NBA teams
Bradford Doolittle, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

What about Chris Paul?

NBA

If the NBA has become a point guard's league, then most certainly the Western Conference has become a showcase for the little guys who put up such big numbers (click here to check out all of our content debating Stephen Curry vs. Russell Westbrook).

However, just as the West is packed with title contenders clustered together in a constantly changing race to the top, slotting the circuit's lead guards into a coherent pecking order is no easy task. With our recent debate-fest centering around Westbrook and Curry, many have asked what about Chris Paul and where does he fit in among the West's point guard elite?

Let's start with some top-down measurements comparing point guards between the two conferences.

The West's total of 137 WARP from point guards is the highest positional total of any in either conference. The portion of total WARP for each circuit that is accounted for by point guards is similar -- 27 percent for the West to 26 percent for the East -- so by that measure the West is slightly more dominated by lead guards.

This gap might or might not be larger depending on what you want to do with Goran Dragic, who spent much of the season playing off the ball in Phoenix, but is now the unquestioned lead guard in Miami. Since we're taking snapshots here, Dragic is considered a point guard for Miami in the East in these numbers, but bear in mind his situation when considering the disparities outlined here.

The final line of the table is the most striking. If you add up the WARP totals just for the top 10 point guards in each conference, the West trounces the East 113.2 to 80.9, a difference of 32.3. That means two things. First, if you look only at the point guards beyond the top 10, the East has actually had more production. But the star point guards in the West are so dominant that they alone account for about 41 percent of the WARP gap between the conferences.

In other words, if the East's star point guards measured up to their Western counterparts, or the talent distribution of these players was more balanced between circuits, we wouldn't spend nearly so much time worrying about the overall dominance of the West.  

So if you wonder why we'd go to the trouble to rank the point guards from just one conference, that's why. There are certainly plenty of star non-point guards in the league, though it's not difficult to argue that some of those players -- think LeBron James and James Harden -- do a lot of things that point guards do. Still, in many respects it's the star point guards in the West who dominate our narratives about this season in the NBA.

We'll let these rankings shed some light on where CP3 stands according to the numbers.

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