How three hoop dreamers turned the basketball world upside down in 2015.
Stephen Curry won the NBA’s Most Valuable Player award for 2015, and his Golden State Warriors won the championship. Curry’s remarkable offensive abilities propelled the Warriors to 67 wins last season, and a record 24- 0 start this season.
As this has happened, Curry’s performance has been presented as a natural evolution. The NBA’s offensive priorities have been shifting for more than a decade, with the midrange game being de-emphasized in favour of the three- pointer. Unless you can hit longer two-point jumpers more than half of the time — and very few players can — or parlay those attempts into trips to the free- throw line, those shots are bad ones. Curry, likely the best shooter in NBA history once you factor in degree of difficulty, workload and accuracy, was inevitable. He is what happens when an exceptional shooter plays in a league that prioritizes shooting from both a strategic and rules standpoint.
No, sorry. To view Curry in this framework accepts that anything we have seen dating back to the start of last season is normal. It is not normal. What Curry is doing, one preposterous mesh- destined jumper after another, is more violent than that. He is breaking the NBA.
When the Warriors came to Toronto earlier in December, centre Andrew Bogut theorized that if Curry were simply hunting down his own shot, he could sniff 70 or 80 points in a game. That his high game during the calendar year was 53 points, given the in-game streaks we have seen Curry go on, feels almost disappointing.
“There have been games I’ve been on the bench and just seen him make some threes and stuff like that, take some shots in the paint, double-pump, clutch layups,” Bogut said. “And you’re just, like, ‘ Wow, that’s not supposed to go in,’ but it’s constantly going in.” “The only shots that we sometimes question are ones that we haven’t got ball movement, depending on how the flow of the game is,” interim Warriors coach Luke Walton added. “If Steph wants to come down and shoot on a break, with no passing, we’re fine with that. If it’s fourth quarter and the other team’s on a run and we feel we need some ball movement, then it’s only a bad shot because of the situation of the shot. Any time he shoots the ball, we’re fine with that.”
The way Curry has performed this year, you wonder if even Walton’s single caveat, the exception to his star’s perpetual green light, is too much. Is there such a thing as a bad shot for Curry?
It is a question worth asking, even in the context of the Warriors. Golden State boasts one of the best non- Curry shooters in the league in Klay Thompson, and a cavalcade of above-average three-point shooters: Harrison Barnes, Andre Iguodala, Draymond Green, Ian Clark, Leandro Barbosa and Brandon Rush.
Let’s forget the basics, like the fact that Curry’s 45 per cent accuracy from three-point range makes it seem like he should be as selective as Kyle Korver instead of the most willing long-range shooter in the league, or that his .689 true shooting percentage makes him seem like a player who only shoots when he is dunking.
Let’s get more complicated. He hits half of the shots he takes in the final four seconds of the shot clock, a period in which the rest of the league connects less than a third of the time. He actually connects on shots when opponents are between two and four feet away more regularly than when they are two feet further away. He takes 5.9 pull-up three-pointers a game — statistically much tougher than catchand-shoot three-pointers — more than all but 16 players take in total.
Or, how about this: He is on pace to hit 417 three- pointers this year, which would break his old league record of 286, set last year. That would be a nearly 47 per cent increase on last year. That is bat-poop bonkers. “There are no words to explain,” Barbosa said. “He just has everything, you know?”
While the focus is understandably on his shooting — seriously, watch him drill seven of every 10 shots from the top of the half court logo during his pre-game warm-up — Curry has become a complete offensive force. He is among the league leaders in finishing in the paint, amazing for a player generously listened at 185 pounds. He is probably the NBA’s best ball handler. Search “Stephen Curry Los Angeles Clippers Vine” for proof. And he has the raw assist numbers, currently averaging 6.0 assists per game, to prove he is a fine creator for others. ( That number is down from 7.7 a year ago, a product of two things: Curry is quite rightly shooting more than ever, and Green is taking more of a playmaking role. If you are looking for a player who is a product of the sport’s evolution, Green is your man. A 6-foot-7 swingman who has morphed into a player who can log minutes at centre in the league’s most devastating lineup, pop three-pointers, run the offence and defend any position? Yes, please.)
It is tempting to wonder what Curry would have had to sacrifice had he entered the league in, say, the 1990s. Would he have been a three- point specialist, like his dad? Would he have been forced into the skin of a traditional point guard, prioritizing distribution above all else? Or would his unique blend of skills have forced the issue no matter the time?
Regardless of those hypotheticals, Curry lives in the here and now, where the NBA is racing to figure out how to stop him, how to catch up to him. Curry is pushing the league forward, not the other way around.