"I've been here before, 3-1," he said during a postgame walk-off interview with TNT on Sunday after the Houston Rockets defeated the Utah Jazz to take a 3-1 lead in the NBA Western Conference semifinals. "[Stuff] went bad real quick."
Then, he went into the locker room with his Rockets teammates. Some of them remember the series he referenced; they were the ones who caused his pain. They celebrated Paul's 33rd birthday with cake, bits of which wound up smeared on the locker room floor and stuck to the side of one player's locker.
"James was fouling, they was cheating," Paul said, motioning toward James Harden, now a teammate.