Chris Paul came back to the Clippers this season with a clear idea of what he could still provide beyond minutes: structure, habits, and the kind of day-to-day accountability he helped build everywhere he’s been.
The problem, as Ramona Shelburne reported, is that the Clippers didn’t just struggle to win early, they struggled to receive the kind of leadership Paul instinctively offers.
Shelburne described a series of early attempts by Paul to bring teammates together off the floor, including invites to his suite at Rams games and a team Halloween event.
“Some of the things early on — like, he invited guys to his suite at the Rams game, and he threw a Halloween party, and then… no one came,” Shelburne said. “Like, seriously — a Halloween party, and maybe three players showed up. I think Brad [Bradley Beal] came, and [Ivica] Zubac.”
The detail is funny in isolation, but the context makes it bleak. In Shelburne’s larger reporting on the Clippers’ unraveling, Paul’s culture-building efforts were part of what the team believed it was signing up for, and part of what the team increasingly resisted once friction set in. She framed it as a leadership void Paul tried to fill “the way he knows how,” only to feel the group recoil:
“So you’re looking at this and thinking: he’s trying to fill the leadership void the way he knows how, and every time he did, they would kind of recoil. Like, ‘Eh, it’s too much.’”
The Clippers envisioned Paul as a low-maintenance veteran voice in a limited role, while Paul viewed the reunion as a chance to compete and to function as an extension of the staff , an alignment that didn’t survive early losses, clashing expectations, and complaints that his approach could feel abrasive.
Even the Halloween party appears as a well-intended attempt at chemistry that drew only “a handful of players,” a small turnout that now reads less like a scheduling quirk and more like an early signal.
That’s why the Halloween party story matters. It isn’t about who likes costumes or who skipped a social event. It’s about a team that, when presented with a veteran trying to set standards, didn’t lean in, and a veteran who kept trying anyway. By the time the season’s tension boiled over and the Clippers made their stunning decision to send Paul home mid-trip, the relationship had already been telling on itself in small moments. The party was just the clearest metaphor: Paul showed up ready to build something, and too few people followed him into the room.
