Before the All-Star break, one balmy night in Sacramento, Chris Paul is sitting in the visitors' locker room of Arco Arena listening to his iPod. It's been a week since his team, the New Orleans Hornets, made their unlikely climb into first place in the Western Conference, and just yesterday the 22-year-old was named to the All-Star Team for the first time. Paul's new signature basketball shoe, produced by the noted cobbler Michael Jordan, will be unveiled in a month. Reflecting on the confluence of happy events, Paul strips off his headphones and says, "Man, it's one of those feelings of Whoo!"

I know that sound. It's one I made on press row about an hour later, when he darted into the lane and dished the ball with such cunning that I had to scan the court to figure out where he'd thrown it. The Paul Era is about elusiveness, whether it's in the point guard's lightning-quick style of play or in his politely reserved personality. CP3 — as he's known to his teammates — might be the best player in the NBA who doesn't brag about it.

Despite being picked fourth in the 2005 NBA Draft and winning the league's Rookie of the Year award, Paul has remained one of the league's lesser-known superstars. That's changing now. In December, ESPN.com's John Hollinger looked at Paul's stats and proclaimed that he was on pace to have the best season of any player under six foot three in NBA history. David J. Berri, coauthor of The Wages of Wins, has developed a formula that judges NBA players on the number of victories they're responsible for. At midseason, Paul was the most productive point guard and fourth most productive player overall, only a few wins behind the likes of Boston's Kevin Garnett. "Chris Paul is at an amazing level right now," Berri says.

The reason for Paul's relative obscurity is his residence in New Orleans. Even now, almost three years after Hurricane Katrina, the Big Easy remains a depressed, beleaguered city. "It hasn't been on TV as much as it used to be," says Paul, who has toured the Ninth Ward. "It's one of those things: out of sight, out of mind." The first-place Hornets draw about 12,000 fans a night, the second-lowest total in the NBA. The NBA hopes the All-Star Game, with Paul, teammate David West, and Hornets' coach Byron Scott, will bring attention and interest back to the city.

Paul was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he developed into a high-scoring high-school point guard. In 2002, the day after Paul signed his letter of intent to play college basketball at Wake Forest, his grandfather, Nathaniel Jones, was murdered in his driveway. A few nights later, Paul took the court and scored 61 points — his grandfather's age when he died — before taking himself out of the game and weeping on the bench. He now runs the Nathaniel Jones Scholarship Fund, which sends deserving high-school grads to Wake Forest.