Chris Paul has long been the victim of perhaps the laziest, most ill-conceived narrative in NBA history, one that deemed this absolutely amazing basketball player, this guy who will go down as one of the five best point guards to ever play, somehow unfit to lead a team to deep into the postseason because he'd gone the first 12 years of his career without advancing past the second round of the playoffs. 

This year, finally, he had a co-star capable of matching his own talent, and he rode the likely MVP James Harden and Daryl Morey's beautifully designed Rockets team to within one win of the NBA Finals. And then, as he watched from the bench with a ripped-up hamstring, the whole thing slowly, painfully slipped away. 

The Warriors are going to the Finals. 

The Rockets, after going up 3-2 in the series, are going home.

The whole thing just feels wrong. Cruel in every sense of the word. To watch Paul have to sit on the bench, physically incapable of helping his teammates that were slowly drowning without him, was torture. If you weren't wishing for Paul to miraculously find his way onto the court for this Game 7, even at 50 percent on whatever strength he could muster, you don't have a sports soul. 

Paul deserved to play in that game. The Rockets deserved for him to play in that game. They were right there, one good half of basketball in either Game 6 or Game 7 from heading to the NBA Finals and giving Paul a week to get right for the championship shot a player of his caliber so richly deserves. 

That's the thing: The Rockets had two cracks at this. They were up 17 to start Game 6. You don't think Paul, with all his seasoning and savvy, with his ability to methodically orchestrate the pace of a game, would've made any difference in holding that lead? You don't think he would've made a difference in Game 7, when Houston again bum-rushed Golden State but ultimately ran out of gas with a rotation that had been shrunken, effectively, to six players?

This is not to say the Rockets would've surely won with a healthy Paul, whose presence alone clearly wouldn't have made up for Houston's 7-for-44 mark from the 3-point line in Game 7. At one point they missed 27 straight. You could pull a fan out of the stands and make one out of 27. That the most effective 3-point shooting team in history could go that cold, in that game, is unimaginable.

What weren't unimaginable were the third-quarter runs Golden State went on in Games 6 and 7 to save its season. At this point, you can pretty much book the Warriors, no matter how poorly they're playing, to come out of the locker room and just go straight bananas. That's just what they do. Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green have lost their way a little bit, but talent cures almost all athletic sins -- and those dudes are straight-up amazing. 

But so is Chris Paul. Whether he would've made a difference in one of these final two games, I don't know. But he deserved the chance. Now we have to sit here and listen to an equally lazy storyline that the Warriors are more the beneficiary of luck than their own dominance. I get it: Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love were hurt in the 2015 Finals. In 2016, everyone was healthy and the Warriors lost. Last year Kawhi Leonard went out for the rest of the series in Game 1 of the conference finals, when the Spurs had the Warriors down 25. Now Paul goes down when the Warriors were on the brink. 

And make no mistake: They were absolutely on the brink. The Rockets had them. They were struggling to find any semblance of the ball/player movement identity they've spent four years cultivating. They didn't know which way to turn, and every way they tried, some long, athletic Houston defender was there to switch. Again, Daryl Morey designed an almost perfect roster to truly threaten this Warriors juggernaut. 

But so much of it was predicated on Paul. He and James Harden were -- are -- the whole show. They're not the keys to the engine; they're the whole damn car. The offense doesn't work without them creating just about every shot. Everyone else is merely a spot-up shooter waiting for the opportunities those two guys create. When you only have one of those guys, to try to win against maybe the best team in history is just too much. 

But Houston fought, man. They fought like hell. Paul is a free agent this summer and can sign anywhere he wants. I can't imagine he's going anywhere. This team will be back. I suppose this is what it takes sometimes, like Jordan having to go through the Pistons. Pain is part of the progress and all that. But for Paul, that doesn't make this any easier to swallow.