Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009...8:21 am
Dime Magazine on Paul and Parker
Dime’s Ben York and Austin Burton are debating whether Chris Paul or Tony Parker is the better player. Burton makes his case for Parker:
On the surface, there wasn’t much difference in CP and TP’s brief postseasons. Both of their teams got knocked out in the first round in series that weren’t really that close. But while Paul was below-average (16.6 ppg, 10.4 apg, 1.6 spg, 41% FG) against Chauncey and the Nuggets, Parker was as dominant as a player could be in a losing effort, dropping 28.6 points, 6.8 assists and 1.2 steals against J-Kidd and the Mavs. And TP wasn’t gunning; he shot 54 percent from the field and matched his regular-season assist numbers despite San Antonio having exactly zero credible scoring threats after Tim Duncan.
Read the rest at Dime.
3 Comments
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:32 am
His coach at the INSEP where he played in 98 and 99 told an interesting thing about TP while looking back then for a TV doc about TP. I don’t recall exactly the words, but the idea was that:
TP was not like his INSEP mates (including other strong talents like Diaw and Turiaf). The others all wanted to be good; to be the best they could, which is a good thing, ok. But TP was the guy who, above all, wanted to WIN.
Well, he may have had good and bad luck in his life thus far, but one thing is for sure: he was very fortunate to be selected by the Spurs.
September 5th, 2009 at 11:16 am
I would say that CP is a better traditional point, but TP is a much better slasher/scorer. CP is kind of in the Nash style, where he can be either a facilitator or a scorer. You have to pick your poison against him. I would say Parker is a better specialist but better player would go to CP.
September 6th, 2009 at 6:33 pm
the thing i found most interesting about the article was the fact that york didn’t even bother defending paul as the best player. not that i mind, being a total homer, but i feel like the case could’ve been made a little more solidly for paul as the better player, not just the most valuable player to his team, as he chose to do. might be splitting hairs, but this is what we do.
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