Chris Paul’s Warriors debut got weird in the best ways possible

The weirdness started off in the first quarter. Less than five minutes into the game, Paul got switched onto Suns forward Kevin Durant during a defensive possession. The height mismatch did not end up becoming a factor, as the new Warriors point guard reached into his bag of really annoying tricks to bait the former Warriors forward into an offensive foul. Paul got absurdly close to his much taller opponent, and fell to the floor pretty easily when Durant tried to make space for himself. It was the kind of thing that would have drawn harsh jeers from Warriors fans just a few years ago, but now it was worthy of applause. Imagine telling a fan from 2017 that this was happening.

The new Warrior had an otherwise quiet first half as those watching Tuesday’s game adjusted to Paul’s new threads. Once the third quarter began, Paul — who finished the night flirting with a triple-double at 14 points, six rebounds and nine assists — decided to get weird again, but in the best way possible.

One of the most notable flaws the Warriors have had over the last few years is what the team does while Steph Curry sits. Before this season, all the team could really do was hope their opponent didn’t go on too heavy of a run. While it may be a one-game sample size, that looks to be no longer the strategy with Paul at the helm of the second unit.

With Paul as the primary ball handler throughout the third, the Warriors’ bench mob appears to have gone from a hapless stand-in meant to limit damage in the best-case scenario, to a legitimately potent offense. Not only did Golden State outscore Phoenix 40-19, the team was more aggressive, getting to the line significantly more and scoring more at the rim. At the end of the quarter, the Dubs had shot 16 of their eventual 28 total free throws. Meanwhile, the Suns only got a pair of shots at the charity stripe.

That all happened because the offense mainly ran through Paul’s impeccable feel for the game that creates shots for himself and others, something that’s not been the case for previous Warriors bench squads.

To avoid an overreaction, it’s worth noting that the Suns have a notably top-heavy roster. The guys that make up the team outside the starters would be closer to the end of the bench on a more well-rounded roster. Yet even among the worst rosters last season, the Dubs’ second unit wasn’t putting together runs like what they did Tuesday. 

That run also produced by far the strangest moment of the night. Golden State was rolling, having outscored Phoenix 22-5 in the quarter. Devin Booker had just tried a 15-footer, but the shot rimmed out. After Jonathan Kuminga gathered the rebound and got the ball to Paul, the 38-year-old positioned himself to draw hard contact from Booker, which put the Dubs in the bonus.

Paul made his way to the line and, for the first time ever in Warriors history, a C-P-3 chant broke out.

If the earlier cheers were hard to believe, it would be downright impossible to try and convince any fan from the Splash Bros era that they would end up emphatically chanting Paul’s nickname at the free-throw line in a primetime showdown on national television.  

The final departure from normalcy was the end result. The Warriors were unable to capitalize on the huge scoring outburst in the third, and wound up losing to the Suns, 108-104. The Warriors teams that made those runs a staple of their performances would typically have put games out of reach midway through the fourth. Instead, the Warriors had to battle until the final seconds of the game, and were ultimately thwarted because Booker stepped up in a big way.

It’s certainly not the start to the season that the team wanted. But if Tuesday’s performance is any indication of what’s in store for this season, between Paul’s annoying antics working in the Dubs’ favor and the team’s second unit bringing back those landslide third quarters, then maybe, just maybe, it’ll stop being weird to see Paul in a Warriors jersey.