How is Chris Paul the Last Man Standing?

With Giannis Antetokounmpo absolutely destroying his knee in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference Finals, it brought me to a horrific realization. This is the most fucked up NBA season of all time. The NBA is a league of stars, so what happens when all the stars get hurt? Well, you get a postseason full of teams we all know would likely go further, if not win the championship if they were healthy. Instead, we have a group of world famous athletes whose bodies are breaking down due to the stress of running up and down a hardwood floor 48 minutes a night, 80 times, over the span of 6 1/2 months. Giannis going down in the playoffs makes it 10, that’s right, 10 NBA All-Stars going down with injury during this playoffs. You could argue that any half of these guys would be the best group you can assemble. We certainly won’t be seeing any of them representing Team USA in the upcoming Tokyo Olympics.

The second most is 6 for those of you that were wondering. We can all remember the grueling 3 day stretch a fortnight ago, which saw Donovan Mitchell, Kyrie Irving, and Kawhi Leonard all leave the court for the last time this season. We thought the NBA playoffs would be the demise of the pandemic and Covid-19. Instead, it gave rise to another pandemic.

The one player who has somehow kept himself in the game is the guy who would always get hurt in the playoffs. Chris Paul, while he has been dealing with shoulder issues and even contracted Covid, is still playing and it’s safe to say that if they do not win the championship, the Suns only have themselves to blame. After taking out an Anthony Davis-less Lakers team, a Denver Nuggets team with out the mercurial Jamal Murray, and struggling to take out the Clippers without Kawhi after taking a 3-1 series lead, Phoenix seems to be playing against themselves at this point.

Obviously, LeBron had some thoughts on the matter:

Injury rates were virtually the same this season as they were during 2019-20 while starter-level and All-Star players missed games due to injury at similar rates as the last three seasons,” . “While injuries are an unfortunate reality of our game, we recognize the enormous sacrifices NBA players and teams have made to play through this pandemic.”

– NBA communications officer Mike Bass

When you’re living in a world where 40 million people have been laid off and I’m making $200 million, you won’t get no complaining from me, I’d play back to back to back to back to back. I’m not knocking what anybody said, but me personally, I don’t complain and make excuses because real people are working their tail off and all we gotta do is train two hours a day, and then play a game for two hours at night and make a lot of money…So my thought process is a little different.”

– Shaquille O’Neal in an interview with CNBC

Shaq has a bit of a point, but what he fails to realize (or doesn’t want to publicly admit) is that all of us underdogs working hourly actively look forward to seeing these guys in the playoffs. Like, that’s the whole thing. Would it matter if we didn’t see Lebron, Harden, or Giannis every game throughout the season, if it insured they were dueling in the finals? Fuck no. There weren’t even any fans in attendance this season. The sad fact might just be that the guys we’ve been watching for near 2 decades can’t ultimately bring it like they used to. Regardless, they’re somehow still the best players on the court.

I guess in this bizarro world, meme timeline that we seem to be living in, this is the only possible outcome. To have a league with so many stars, and to have all of them get hurt so that the one star who always got hurt before can go on to win the championship would be the perfect ending to this fucked up, semi-quarantined season. But there’s still possibly two games left in this series. Will Chris Paul and the Suns be able to chisel out their destiny or will the NBA just become even more fucked up? Only time can tell, but if I’ve learned one thing from the past 4 years of my life, it always gets weirder.