Rockets confirm Chris Paul out for Game 6 of West Finals
The Houston Rockets are up three games to two on the Golden State Warriors, and if they can win one of the next two games (including a potential Game 7 at home), they’ll be back in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1995.
The Houston Rockets are in panic mode and quite possibly doomed.
Such is the reality of a basketball world where fortunes turn on a dime and where, just seconds before the final buzzer sounded to give the Rockets a win in Game 5 on Thursday, star point guard Chris Paul pulled up lame, clutching his hamstring.
Paul is now out for Game 6, and the defending world champion Warriors are suddenly the favorites once more.
According to ESPN, Paul’s status is still in doubt for the postseason beyond Game 6 as he awaits the results of an MRI on the sore leg, but Tim MacMahon confirmed that the Rockets have officially ruled their “point god” out of the pivotal elimination contest.
Rockets announce that Chris Paul is out for Game 6 due to a right hamstring strain. He will be-evaluated when the team returns to Houston.
— Tim MacMahon (@espn_macmahon) May 25, 2018
Paul’s father, Charles Paul, expressed what his son is feeling right now.
“To get here and have this,” the elder Paul said, shaking his head. “It comes with the job. You never know what’s going to happen.”
“Chris doesn’t feel sorry for himself. He’s like, ‘OK, this is what happened. We got to make the best of it.’ He’ll talk to the players on the team and say, ‘Hey, I’m still going to be there, even if I don’t play.'”
It’s the latest in an ever-lengthening line of snakebitten moments in the postseason for a point guard who has been injured in three of his team’s last four playoff runs.
When he was with the Clippers in 2015, Paul hurt his hamstring as well; he played through that injury to guide Los Angeles past the defending champion San Antonio Spurs but pushed himself so far in Game 7 that he missed the first two games of the following series against the Rockets.
A year later, Paul broke his hand against the Portland Trail Blazers, and when Blake Griffin went down as well, the Clippers went from being up in the series 2-0 to losing in six games.
The Rockets still have the star power of MVP candidate James Harden, but as good as Harden is at dunking over Draymond Green, having provided “SportsCenter” with highlights in both Games 4 and 5, the simple fact remains that he has missed 20 consecutive three-point shots, including a cover-your-eyes 0-of-11 performance from beyond the arc in Game 5.
Harden, if he is named MVP, runs the risk of running into LeBron James in the Finals, where James may do to him what Michael Jordan did to Charles Barkley in 1993 or Karl Malone in 1997, when those two men won the MVP but saw their teams get smacked by Jordan’s Bulls in the championship.
Indeed, one Twitter user had to pose a question that shouldn’t be asked of a team that still has a guy who once led the league in assists.
https://twitter.com/ripbash/status/1000052029035868161
If Paul is out in Game 7, the Rockets are doomed.
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