Curry joins elite club of NBA icons
FOR probably the first time in his life, Stephen Curry looked like he didn’t know what to do on a court. The buzzer was about to go in the Boston Garden, confirming a fourth NBA championship in eight years for Curry and the Golden State Warriors. And he just stood stockstill on the floor until his father, Dell, burst through the crowd to embrace him. Then the tears came.
Curry crumpled over with emotion in his father’s arms led to the standard response for all great athletes at such moments. For all his superhuman feats, he was just like us, after all. Except of course, he’s not. Never could be.
Curry has long earned the reputation as the greatest shooter that basketball has ever seen. Nobody in the history of the game has made the art of scoring from downtown look so easy.
However, after leading the Warriors to another title in the early hours of Friday morning, it should be time that he enters the conversation as one of the greatest players of all-time. In a podcast he recorded a couple of hours after watching his beloved Boston Celtics lose, Bill Simmons suggested that Steph might make it into the top ten now. Others would have him even higher.
On this side of the world, we have the endless and eternal debate about Messi and Ronaldo but across the pond, for each of their four main sports, America like nothing more than talk about legacies. And where the top players of any era stand in the greatest of all-time. It is the fuel of countless bar-room conversations and sports talk radio shows.
It can be argued that nobody has been as influential as Curry. As the commentary on Friday reminded us, time and again, Curry is a game-changer. He literally changed how the game is played. In the first finals series played after the three-pointer was introduced in 1980, only 23 of those shots were made. These days, you might get that amount in one half of basketball. And that’s all down to Steph Curry.
His greatness shouldn’t have really been in question. But up until game four of this year’s NBA final series, it was. Among the criticism levelled at him was that Curry couldn’t win an NBA title without Kevin Durant – who hightailed it across America to join the mess at the Brooklyn Nets – or that he has never been a MVP in the finals. Well, they can’t say that about him any more.
Walk into any basketball court in this country over the next week or so and you will see the Curry effect. Young players maybe wearing a towel on their head or having their gumshield hang from their mouth. Or, maybe, just a group of youngsters lining up trying to shoot threes. His Golden State team-mate Kevon Looney referenced just how influential Curry is in the aftermath of Friday’s title win.
‘When I go back home to Milwaukee and watch my AAU team play and practice, everybody wants to be Steph. Everybody wants to shoot 3s and I’m like, man, you have to work a little harder to shoot like him.’
There are plenty of strands to this Warriors story. Steve Kerr has proved himself to be an exceptional coach – and exceptional person – by leading the team to their fourth ring in eight years.
The owners have invested wisely into the team – and got their moment of glory on Friday morning with that bizarre practice in American sport where team owners, rather than captains or coaches, lift the title trophy.
Draymond Green showed all his experience to save his best performance of the finals for Game six, silencing the boisterous Boston crowd who had decided he was Public Enemy number one.
Andrew Wiggins stood up when needed during the finals while Klay Thompson, Curry’s former splash brother, has battled back from an ACL and a ruptured Achilles tendon.
But it all comes back to Curry. There are a lot of extraordinarily talented players in the NBA – Giannis Anteokounmpo, Luca Jokic, Kyrie Irving, LeBron James – but none of those players are in a system and team that maximise what they can do as the Warriors does for Curry.
To inspire his team to the title in Boston Garden in a basketballmad city cements Curry as one of the very greatest. Only Magic Johnson managed to do that at the height of his rivalry with Larry Bird. The Celtics had energised their city again and had their fans believing they could claim a first title since 2008. But nobody reckoned on Curry and the rest of the Warriors.
The debate now is whether the Warriors, with their four titles in eight years and having reached the final in six of those seasons, are now a dynasty. I think there should be no question about that, although Bill Simmons did seem to take issue with this in the immediate aftermath of their latest title.
And part of the story is where the Warriors have come from. In the three years since they last appeared in the finals, there was a sense that they had fallen off a cliff. Two years ago, they were the worst team in the league as they struggled after Durant’s departure and Thompson’s long injury lay-off. Last year, the LA Lakers beat them in the much-maligned play-in tournament, although Curry did warn us that they would come back better in 2022.
Curry averaged more than 30 points a game in the series — and remember this includes game five where he failed to hit a threepointer for the first time in over 240 NBA games and Wiggins picked up the slack.
It also includes his sensational performance in Game four, where he scored 43 points and turned the series decisively towards the Warriors.
In time, what he did in game four in Boston might be considered the defining display of a decorated career. But Curry shows no sign of slowing up. He still carries himself with the same boyish, effervescent charm, still has the gumshield hanging from his mouth, the towel on his head. He has been 13 years in the NBA now but it doesn’t seem like that.
It was a thrilling NBA season, but it was defined by one player. There will never be any more questions about if Steph Curry is one of the greatest ever.
The only question left is where he should be placed in the pantheon — and he might have a few more chapters to write before that can be answered accurately.
“Nobody has
been more influential”