I posted in the group discussion when free agency first started that my main goal was for the Spurs to pass on signing Chris Paul.

Coping with being a Spurs fan and a Chris Paul hater
Rooting for Chris Paul after spending a decade sports-hating him is more challenging than expected.

I hate Chris Paul. It’s exclusively sports hate, of course, but it is intense. He’s been my least favorite player for over a decade. If I could have picked an active future Hall-of-Famer to never wear Silver and Black, it would have been Chris Paul. A lot of people dislike Chris Paul, but I hate Chris Paul.

When free agency started, I sent a message in the group chat saying that the only thing I really wanted was for the Spurs not to sign Chris Paul. A few hours later they did and I wrote a positive reaction post about it because even through my irrational hate, I have always been able to recognize that he was a great player and remains a good one. But I wasn’t happy.

There’s a lot I dislike about Paul but as with most one-sided sport grudges, part of it has to do with the player actually being good. Paul was a thorn in the Spurs’ side for a while both in New Orleans and Los Angeles. San Antonio swept Paul and the Clippers once, but the two other series went to seven games. The Spurs and Paul won one each, with Paul getting the last laugh by hitting a game-winner over Tim Duncan in 2015, killing any possibility of a repeat. The way he hit that shot was also particularly painful, as it mirrored the way he used his deadly mid-range jumper to torment the Spurs defense for years. A drive into a stop and then the fadeaway. Familiar. Predictable. Brutal.

That moment was bad but it’s not the only or even the main reason for my unreasonably strong hate for Paul. He’s been a dirty player since college, where he infamously nut-punched Julius Hodge. For someone often regarded as one of the smartest, more even-keeled players to lace them up, he’s made terrible mistakes in the playoffs repeatedly. He’s snitched on players to officials for minor infractions, which is hallway monitor behavior, but he also flops often, so it’s not like he has some high moral standard that he’s trying to uphold. He’s clearly an angry guy who alienated teammates in the past and had two of the nicest guys ever in Pau Gasol and Tim Duncan telling him to calm down.

You have to be really annoying and hotheaded to anger those two.

There’s less to dislike about his game, but the discourse around him has mostly been insufferable. The Point God moniker people use to refer to him signaled a commitment to positional purity and led to Paul being used as a contrast to any scoring point guards who “didn’t make their teammates better.” The conversation about the blocked trade to the Lakers was exhausting and gave one of the most annoying fan bases out there an excuse for their struggles. Even the work he’s done as head of the players’ union is divisive at best for many reasons, including the passing of a rule that mainly benefitted him and his friends. It’s been occasionally fun to watch Paul but it’s rarely been fun to discuss him, which is a problem because he’s now on the Spurs and my job is to discuss him.

Tribalism is helping, to a degree. Fandom changes when you spend years writing about not only the Spurs, but the entire league, and I still want San Antonio to win. Rooting for Chris Paul causes me some cognitive dissonance but if he helps on the court I’ll eventually justify some of the things I hated in the past. Those fouls he creates by snaking his way to the middle after the screen, taking a step forward then stopping to create contact with the tailing defender? That’s going to become veteran wiliness instead of the cheap foul hunting I despise and has turned Trae Young into the heir apparent to Paul at the top of my most hated list. “After all, Manu used to do that sometimes and I liked him,” I’ll say. Paul’s vibes-killing self-seriousness? “It’s just the professionalism and leadership the young Spurs need.”

That’s the hope, at least. I’ll be fair to Chris Paul, and I’m hoping I’ll only get to sing his praises as he puts together a fantastic year, but will I actually enjoy watching my least favorite player on my favorite team? There have been guys I wasn’t a fan of in the past, but nothing like this.

At some point, probably on opening night, Paul will walk the ball up after complaining to the refs about something. He’ll bark orders to his teammates, use a screen, bait a foul and be praised for being smart. Only at that moment and based on my reaction I’ll know if the Silver and Black jersey has changed anything or if my disdain for Paul is too strong to overcome.