Chris Paul JV Point Guard
Chris Paul Played JV Basketball. Now He’s Playing in the NBA Finals.
Before he was the Point God, he was a junior-varsity point guard—for two years
Chris Paul is having one of the greatest, unlikeliest seasons of his career. MARK J. REBILAS/REUTERSSHARE
Tim Fuller became the coach of a high school’s junior-varsity basketball team in 2001, and it didn’t take him long to recognize that his point guard was good. Then he realized that he was too good.
“Why are you playing JV?” he asked.
His coach was not the only person wondering why a sophomore named Chris Paul was still on the JV. His teammates were, too. “I thought that all the time,” said JJ Cook, who is now a yoga instructor.
When a local newspaper honored Paul as the area’s player of the year—the Winston-Salem Chronicle’s headline was “Paul’s leadership, unselfish play set him apart in JV basketball”—his own coach admitted that he was overqualified for the award. “I felt lucky to have him all season,” he said, “because I thought they were going to move him up to the varsity.”
If someone is playing JV basketball as a sophomore, he’s probably not bound for college basketball, and he’s almost certainly not making it to the NBA. He might not even make varsity. It would be unusual for a future star to play even one season of JV. Paul played two. He was on the varsity football team before he was on the varsity basketball team.
But there was a prescient strategy behind the Paul family’s counterintuitive decision to keep him down a level for another year. They didn’t want him to be a role player for the varsity. They wanted him to be the leader of the junior varsity.
“When he played JV, he made everybody better,” said Charles Paul, his father. “The same thing he’s doing now, he did on JV.”
What he’s doing now is playing in the NBA Finals, finally, after one of the greatest, unlikeliest seasons of his career. The Phoenix Suns hadn’t been to the playoffs in a decade. Then they traded for Paul. It was a wise move. They won the Western Conference on Wednesday night, when he turned in his latest masterful performance, scoring 41 points to secure his first appearance in the Finals when the rest of the basketball world least expected it.
Paul is 36 years old and 6-feet tall. NBA players would prefer to be neither. He’s already played more than anybody of his size in the league’s history, and he once had a team attach draft picks to dump his seemingly toxic contract. It was a long shot for him to get to the Finals with this team at this point in his career.
But a peculiar thing about the NBA’s best players is that many of them look in the mirror and see underdogs. In the stories they craft about themselves, they are forever the versions of themselves right before their ascents. Chris Paul will always think of himself as the sophomore on JV because those two formative years at point guard shaped the player now known as the Point God.
“I wasn’t this phenom,” Paul said recently. “I played two years of JV basketball.”
Michael Jordan was so distraught that he didn’t make the varsity basketball team as a sophomore that he clung to the grudge for the rest of his career and spun the half-truth that he’d been cut by his own high school into the sport’s most famous origin story. Paul was more diplomatic about his time on a North Carolina high school’s JV team.
“It bothered me at first,” he said in 2001. “Now I think it was the best thing that could have happened.”
Paul was old and wise even when he was young and inexperienced, according to more than a dozen people familiar with the West Forsyth High School (Clemmons, N.C.) junior varsity in 2000 and 2001. He could have been on the varsity. But what he couldn’t have done was lead the varsity. “He was better at being a leader and the guy in charge of the JV than a guy coming off the bench for the varsity,” said David Laton, the varsity coach.
Instead of being the backup to a senior point guard on the varsity, “he was going to be the man on the JV,” said Chris Miller, one of his classmates. It was a decision inspired by the experience of Paul’s older brother, C.J., who made the varsity as a freshman before their father intervened. “I didn’t like it,” Charles Paul said. “I told the coach: I need my son on the JV. The only way he can get better is to play.”
They followed that formula for their younger son who got so much better that he would play in the NBA.
Chris Paul was a basketball savant long before he could have been on varsity. In eighth grade, he traded scouting reports with Tommy Witt, the coach of another school’s eighth-grade team. It was the only time in his 25 years of coaching that Witt swapped intelligence with a middle-schooler.
An opposing JV coach named Jeff Overby was impressed by Paul the very first time he schemed against this diminutive freshman point guard. Overby called for his team to press and trap. Paul took a dribble backward, split the double team, shielded himself from a future college-football defensive tackle and scored on a layup. Overby kept pressing and trapping. On the next possession, Paul whipped a one-handed pass for another layup. Overby called off the presses and traps. “That right there told me that his basketball IQ was way ahead of anyone in the gym,” he said.
Overby was surprised to see him back in that gym the following year. He wasn’t surprised that Paul was calling out their plays. He knew that “Dallas” meant they were trapping off the dribble but “Pittsburgh” was off the pass. He seemed to know everything there was to know about his rival JV team.
“We changed our calls because he knew our calls,” Overby said. “That’s how smart he was.”
It had taken Overby two plays to recognize that Paul was unlike anyone else on the floor. It took David Gelatt one.
He moved to Paul’s school before their junior year and was told by the varsity basketball coach that he might be the star of the team. He called his father with the good news. Then he went to an open gym. That point guard from the JV took off on a fast break, passed to himself between Gelatt’s legs, finished the layup and handed the ball to the new kid.
“Welcome to North Carolina,” Chris Paul said.
Gelatt called his father again. He wasn’t going to be the star, he said. He wasn’t even sure that he would make the team.
But together they formed the backcourt of the rare junior-varsity basketball team worth remembering. Paul turned a bunch of future salesmen and yoga teachers into the JV version of the Suns. He controlled everything. He yapped at everyone. He perfected moves that would dupe NBA defenders, and he learned to have the ball in close games. “But very rarely did games get close,” said Austin Allgood. “I mean, we had Chris Paul.”
That year turned out to be the beginning of the rest of his life. He blew up that summer. He picked Wake Forest for college basketball. He left two years later for the NBA as one of the country’s finest young players.
But first there was another team for Chris Paul to leave: the JV.