The new Chris Paul mascot is nightmare fuel

The Houston Rockets have dropped a metric ton of nightmare fuel into the Toyota Center with their new Chris Paul mascot.

In a world of Cristiano Ronaldo busts and Pierre The Pelican reboots the new Chris Paul mascot is either meant to strike fear in the hearts of opponents or offer an abstract take on the mug of the well known State Farm spokesperson.

C’mon. You gotta do the Point Gawd better than this. The man’s a future Hall of Famer and the team was undefeated when he put on a jersey for the majority of this season.

Perhaps we Rockets fans are accustomed to a misconstrued standard for player recreation. You can slap a black beard on a pineapple and it’s a pretty solid likeness of James Harden. Put a chef hat on a baby... boom, it’s James Harden cooking.

Reconstituting Chris Paul in mascot form may be a step too far for Houston’s giant head fabrication specialists (Disagree? Call the Rockets if you fabricate giant heads for a living).

This thing has some Chris Paul ears. They nailed the ears. But that’s about where it ends.

TDS readers weighed in on Twitter:

Still hanging on to the belief this could be mistaken for Chris Paul in the Taco Cabana drive thru? Compare it to the 2017 Houston Rockets Chris Paul bobblehead...

That’s Chris Paul! It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t look like Paul is slowly succumbing to the bends or quickly expanding in a cartoon reality’s vacuum of space.

In the end I’m going to assume this is just an elaborate Rick and Morty situation where each successive clone of Rick Sanchez (or Chris Paul promotional recreation) is slightly more disfigured and mangled than the last.