Chris Paul knows how to charm the jackets off of people. Or better yet, how to provide the perfect assist.

It was March of 2016 and Paul was overseeing his first labor talks as player president of the National Basketball Players Association, seeking a new collective-bargaining agreement. Prior to the first major negotiating session, each NBA owner who was a member of the league’s labor committee received a Nike warmup suit in their size, courtesy of Paul.

Bob Metelus

He had been a union leader at the NBPA for years, including being on the executive committee during the bitterly fought 2011 NBA lockout. This time, he wanted to set a different tone.

“After being in the meetings already … some of those meetings, there’s a bunch of posturing, everybody’s in there in suits and nothing is getting done,” Paul said. “I just wanted people to be comfortable.”

Almost all of the owners who arrived at the meeting at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles donned the warmup jackets, according to Commissioner Adam Silver.

“I think most of the owners didn’t wear the pants — only the jackets,” Silver remembered. “But they took their sport coats off and their ties and they put the Nike warmup jacket on. … We were all sitting there and we were wearing Nike warmup jackets — and we got a big kick out of it. I think we all were laughing about it for the first few minutes of the meeting. It truly was an ice-breaker.”

It was a grand gesture, but that kind of thing comes easily for Paul. People who know him say he may have as much charm as he does talent on the basketball court.

A nine-time NBA All-Star, the 2006 Rookie of the Year and a seven-time NBA All-Defensive First Team selection, Paul has been involved in representing and protecting player interests almost since entering the league as the fourth overall pick in the 2005 draft.

The NBA and its players have a long history of labor strife, which has led to four lockouts in the last 25 years. Paul was the youngest player and the only All-Star on the executive committee during the 2011 lockout, which lasted 161 days. That was when David Stern was running the league and Billy Hunter was head of the union, and they were fighting over the league’s demand to cut the players’ share of revenue. There were long days and nights of hard bargaining, Paul remembers, including a 16-hour meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

“I always have that picture in my mind of being in that room sitting on one side of the table and the owners sitting on the other side,” said Paul, who was then with the Los Angeles Clippers. “What I remember especially when I was young is sitting in those meetings and being intimidated — seriously — not knowing really enough information.”

Since being elected player president in 2013, Paul has played a key role in forging a productive relationship between owners and players that is the envy of other major leagues. At least in part, that’s because of an especially close relationship he maintains with NBPA Executive Director Michele Roberts, as well as with Silver. And through the years, Paul has been involved in many issues affecting players and the game behind the scenes.

With the new CBA, which was announced in December 2016, the NBA has labor peace until at least 2023. More importantly, Paul said, players and owners have a healthy, functional relationship.

“Years ago, when I think about the negotiations of that first [2011] CBA that I was a part of, it was almost like it was us against them — against each other,” Paul said. “And the biggest thing we did in the last CBA negotiation and what Adam is great at is … it’s really supposed to be a partnership.”

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Paul and Silver landed in their current positions just a few months apart. Paul was elected NBPA president in August 2013; Silver officially took over as commissioner in February 2014 after many years of being Stern’s No. 2. But Silver and Paul have a relationship that extends years before that.

It goes back at least to 2006, when the NBA instituted a new synthetic basketball to replace the traditional leather ball. Paul, a second-year player with New Orleans at the time, picked up the phone and called Silver.

“I remember Chris reaching out to me to say, ‘I don’t think the players are being properly heard on this issue,’” Silver recalled. “He said, ‘I’m a point guard. I handle the ball more than anyone else on the court. This ball is hurting the game.’

“He had such a strong point of view and he wanted to make sure he was being heard and break through the bureaucracy.”

The league, which had unveiled the new ball in June, went back to the old ball that December after player complaints.

LeBron James corrals Paul, a close friend, during the melee between the Lakers and Rockets.Getty Images

A similar situation occurred in 2013 when the NBA told Derrick Rose, then with the Chicago Bulls, that he couldn’t wear Kinesio Tape for muscle soreness.

“Derrick Rose was playing with the Kinesio Tape and I saw something that came out that says, ‘League says players can’t play with the Kinesio Tape,’” Paul said. “I was like, ‘What?’ So I called Adam. … I was like, ‘Kinesio Tape is not giving anybody any added advantage.’”

Soon after, the NBA reversed the ban.

Since Paul has been president and Silver commissioner, their relationship has grown. Paul, now with the Houston Rockets, says they talk frequently about many issues.

In 2017, Paul called Silver after watching the NBA All-Star Game on television. For the first time in a decade he was not part of the game, and Paul didn’t like what he saw.

“It was a sloppy game and there was a sense that players were not fully engaged,” Silver recalled. “Chris, who was not in the game that year, called me and said, ‘We have to fix this.’ I said, ‘Well, let’s talk about it.’”

Paul came up with the idea of having the leading vote-getters from the East and West hold a draft, similar to a playgroud pick’em. A meeting, attended by Paul and Roberts from the union side and Silver and Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan on the league side, resulted in an agreement on what became the All-Star Draft. Coming up on its second year, the draft has generated media buzz and this year will be televised. It also has led to what many — including Silver — consider a more entertaining game.

“We do talk all the time and on a variety of issues,” Silver said. “I speak to Chris almost every week. We’ve had a hiatus, a gap, in our usual conversations because of the skirmish in the Lakers-Rockets game. We’ve been texting since. We are all fine.”

That skirmish was a blow to Paul’s nice-guy image. It also resulted in being temporarily kicked out of the game he loves for taking a swing at the Lakers’ Rajon Rondo. According to Paul and subsequently confirmed in an investigation by the NBA, Rondo had spit in his face. Paul was suspended for two games. Rondo (three games) and the Lakers’ Brandon Ingram (four games) also were suspended.

Rondo denied he spit at Paul in an interview with ESPN, and his response attacked Paul’s character. “Everyone wants to believe Chris Paul is a good guy,” Rondo told ESPN. “They don’t know he’s a horrible teammate. They don’t know how he treats people.”

If Paul’s star power wasn’t enough, it happened during a nationally televised game featuring LeBron James’ L.A. debut as a Laker. During the melee, James smothered Paul in a bear hug, towering over him and pulling him out of the action. James is first vice president of the NBPA, and he and Paul are close friends.

But the damage had been done. In a tabloid world, the media coverage was relentless.

The fight was a delicious subject in the world of sports talk television and radio, where hosts have hashed and rehashed the incident and the actions of the personalities involved. One question that has been asked repeatedly is: “Who is Chris Paul really?”

For those who wonder how such an unassuming guy could react so aggressively in a fight, those who know him say the answer is not that surprising.

“When you talk about Chris, you talk about someone who is extreme,” said James Jones, interim GM of the Phoenix Suns and a former NBA player and NBPA executive committee member who’s also a longtime friend of Paul’s. “He is extremely charming, extremely good looking, extremely selfless, but at the same time, extremely competitive, extremely focused.”

Those traits have Paul continuously pushing for more, Jones said, and that can rub some people the wrong way.

“You really see that side of him when he is in between those lines,” he said. “When he is on the court, he is ‘win at all costs.’ You love him if he is your teammate. You can’t stand him if you are his adversary.”

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Paul has had many mentors throughout his life. Jones and Willie Green, a former player and current Warriors assistant coach, are close friends who were both members of the executive committee when Paul started with the union. He also talks to Bob Iger, Walt Disney Co. chair and CEO, frequently.

Iger met Paul when he was traded to the Clippers in 2011, and though Iger’s had a lot of athletes ask him for advice and guidance, Paul is the one relationship of those that has endured. Iger and Paul speak on the phone at least once a week and text more than that. 

“Over that time, it would be completely accurate to say we’ve become friends,” Iger said. “He’s genuine, first of all. He’s effective. He’s serious. He’s mature. He likes to have a good time. He’s competitive as it gets — that’s what drives him. And he has a prodigious work ethic.”

Paul stepped out of his comfort zone last summer to host the Nickelodeon “Kids’ Choice Sports Awards.”Getty Images

For Paul, though, it always comes back to family. He spends much of his time with his two children, his wife Jada and his brother, C.J. His mother, Robin, and father, Charles, are big influences on his life.

“For me, I am 33 years old, have two kids, married and all, but do you know whose approval I look for more than anything?” Paul said. “My dad. My dad is the most God-fearing, humble man that I know.”

Charles Paul was in the stands the night of the Lakers fight, as was the rest of Paul’s family. His first thought, Paul said, was of his kids — and then his father.

“If after the game my dad looked at me like, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ — then I would have been messed up,” he said.

That didn’t happen.

“People can say this or say that or whatever, but if my dad’s cool, I’m cool,” he said.

While people notice Paul’s drive to succeed, they also notice his ability to admit his faults, fears and when he doesn’t know something.

He hosted Nickelodeon’s “Kids’ Choice Sports Awards” last summer and had “a natural ease to him” even though it was his first time hosting a television show, said Constance Schwartz-Morini, one of the show’s producers. “He worked extremely hard in rehearsals to make it a great show,” Schwartz-Morini said. “He told me he was nervous before the show, but that’s normal and didn’t show at all.”

In CBA negotiations, Silver said Paul never hesitates to acknowledge when he doesn’t understand something. “He’d say, ‘I need more information on that,’” Silver said. “He’d say, ‘That is something I am not familiar with,’ and that was something I have come to really appreciate. He is very direct, open and honest in his discussions.”

After the 2011 CBA negotiations, where owners were complaining about costs and losing money, Paul felt he didn’t understand enough about the league’s business. He and Jones got their hands on every financial report they could find — not just for NBA teams but for other sports, too, as well as TV and other media contracts, Jones said.

Paul said one of the reasons the NBA now has labor peace is he and the other player leaders learned more about the business. “And James Jones, he was my partner through all of it,” Paul said. “We were more comfortable with the business of the league and where the game has gone and where we wanted to continue to go.”

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When Paul was elected president of the NBPA, the union was arguably at a low point in its 64-year history. The vote was held in Las Vegas on Aug. 22, 2013, about six months after the players had fired Billy Hunter as their executive director.

Hunter, who had run the union for 17 years, was dismissed after an investigation in which law firm Paul Weiss issued a report finding he had acted against the union’s interests and instead in his own interest.

Paul becoming president was a bit of a surprise. The day of the election, The New York Times published a story saying Roger Mason Jr., a 32-year-old journeyman, was going to run for the job unopposed. “The task at hand is pretty great,” Mason was quoted in the story, in which he also said he had the full endorsement of his fellow executive committee members.

That turned out not to be the case.

“I had no intentions of running that day,” Paul said. But the night before and early that day, executive committee members approached him about running for the position. “Jerry Stackhouse came to me and he was like. ‘You need to run for president.’”

After getting the job, Paul got to work. There was a lot to do.

“When Chris took over … we were like teetering,” said Ron Klempner, NBPA senior counsel, collective bargaining, who has worked at the union for 25 years and served as interim executive director after Hunter’s departure. “It could have really gone either way. People didn’t have great confidence in what the union could accomplish.”

In addition to having no executive director, the union was grappling with a reduction in the players’ share of revenue under the CBA that ended the 2011 lockout. Many on the staff had left; the ones who stayed were demoralized.

“We had a staff here of like 10 people, total, in the office and half of them are admins and we are trying to run this operation here,” Klempner said. “And Chris comes in and he’s like, ‘You guys can do this. Keep this thing together. Hold down the fort.’”

One of his first orders of business was hiring a new executive director.

Paul, as well as other members of the union’s executive committee, interviewed dozens of candidates for the position. “What opened my eyes was to see how many people wanted the job,” Paul said. “And I see why. You have the opportunity to represent 450 of the most recognizable athletes in the world.”

Paul had to interview candidates between games during the 2013-14 season. He met Michele Roberts in Chicago, when he was with the Clippers on the road playing the Bulls. They met in a hotel between practice and that night’s game. Despite no woman having ever led a major sports union, Paul let Roberts, a well-regarded trial lawyer, know from the get-go that he was serious.

“He completely blew me away, because he was really interviewing me,” Roberts remembered. “He was very polite, but it was clear within a second of the conversation, he was not going to be impressed with my credentials. … He asked me, ‘With all due respect, there is nothing I’ve heard about you or read about you that gives me any idea that you know anything about this game.’”

She convinced him otherwise, and Roberts was elected executive director in July 2014.

Asked if any NBA players had a problem with Roberts being a woman, Paul doesn’t hesitate.

“No,” he said.

Really?

“No,” he repeated. “We wanted the best person, and she was that.”

Because of what happened under previous union leadership, the players made it clear that they would take a much more active role in the union — and in CBA negotiations — going forward.

Since developing a relationship early in his career with Adam Silver, Paul has always had the ear of the NBA commissioner, oftentimes helping resolve player issues behind the scenes.Getty Images

A common problem at sports unions typically is that star players don’t have the time or desire to get involved at the highest levels. In 2015, after Paul became president, James joined the executive committee, and since then it has added other top names, including Stephen Curry and Carmelo Anthony.

“In the first CBA negotiations I was a part of, I was the only max player on the board,” Paul said, referring to players with maximum-value contracts. “When you don’t have a full representation of players on the board, you don’t have a full perspective of the CBA.”

Klempner and Roberts said that Paul has fought for the rights of all players, whether they’re maximum-value or those on their first contracts. In 2011, Paul came up with what is known as the Derrick Rose rule, which allows certain players coming off their rookie contract to negotiate a contract worth up to 30 percent of the salary cap, instead of 25 percent previously, if they meet certain standards.

“He does deserve credit for coming up with the Derrick Rose rule,” Klempner said. “He felt that based on his own experience coming in as a younger player that younger players who had an immediate impact on the game should be treated better.”

Roberts noted that in the 2016 CBA negotiations, the one deal-breaker the executive committee agreed on before they sat down at the table — the one thing that would make them walk out of negotiations — was if they did not get raises to the minimums that benefited members of the league’s so-called middle class.

“Everything was sort of cast in, ‘Are the guys prepared to be locked out for this? Are the guys prepared to walk out for this?’” Roberts said. “One of the things that Chris was adamant about is we have to increase compensation for the middle class, and that was something that the players were prepared to be locked out on.”

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Paul ran unopposed and was re-elected to a second, four-year term as NBPA president in June 2017. There are a few things he wants to accomplish during this term. Protecting players from losing money they have invested with financial advisers is high on that list.

“One of the biggest things I get passionate and emotional talking about is financial literacy,” he said. “A lot of times the big story that you’ll see is how a big guy blew all his money or he lost all his money. For me, I hate that. I mean, I hate that with a passion.”

As for himself, Paul is not sure what he wants to do when he retires from playing, but it won’t be coaching.

“I don’t want to coach — and that’s not because I don’t love the game — it’s just that I travel so much that I want to try to be around my kids and my family as much as I can,” he said. “I honestly would like to get into [team] ownership.”

As president of the NBPA, Paul’s close relationship with Executive Director Michele Roberts has helped the union thrive in recent years.Bob Metelus

Asked if he wanted to be a majority owner of an NBA team, Paul said, “Lord, yeah, I’d like to be the main owner, but I think I’ve got some work to do.”

“I could easily see him in team ownership in some form,” Iger said. “I think he would be great at that. … I can see Chris being a businessman whether it’s owning a team or another business. He has a winning personality. He’s smart. He’s capable of being a really serious student. He likes to learn.”

Possible ownership aside, Paul is widely expected to be inducted into the basketball hall of fame after he retires from playing. Sports Illustrated pegs him as a first-ballot lock. Jones also thinks Paul will be in the hall of fame, and the reason has as much to do with his work ethic and high expectations as his physical abilities.

“As talented as he is, his drive, his desire, far exceeds any of his talent,” Jones said. “Because if you watch Chris throughout his career, he’s gotten better in so many different areas. But he hasn’t gotten faster. You know, he got into the league as a smaller, quick point guard, super shifty, super fast. Now, multiple years into the league, he is still dominating the game because of his desire to adapt and get better.”

Being able to adapt has allowed Paul to take what he’s learned on the court into the boardroom and bring it to the negotiating table, Silver said. When they’re in a room full of people during collective bargaining, Paul has what Silver calls “full-court awareness.” He sees everything happening in the room.

“It’s the same skill a great point guard has,” Silver said. “He was noticing a side conversation in the back of the room and he would ask me, ‘What was that conversation about?’ Somebody made a comment at the meeting that to him seemed unrelated. He said to me later, ‘Adam, explain to me why they were asking that question at that time.’ It may have meant something to the team owners it didn’t mean to the players.”

Roberts, too, has noticed Paul translating basketball skills into being a leader off the court. For example, she said Paul insists that all voices be heard. “He’ll notice that only the veterans are talking and he’ll say, ‘What about you rooks?’” Roberts said.

Told of Silver’s comment, she said, “It’s funny that Adam said that because on occasion I’ve thought, [Chris is] distributing the ball. … He is behaving like a point guard.”

And like usual, providing the perfect assist.