Curry’s current hot streak transcendent
For half a decade, we consumed the greatness of Stephen Curry within the context of a chase for titles on historically great teams. As amazing as it was to watch his skills applied on a nightly basis, it was a more difficult phenomenon to value historically than, say, LeBron James making the NBA Finals for eight consecutive years just by showing up.
Here was Curry, a player like the NBA had never seen before with a shooting stroke that broke the traditional bounds of the game and reimagined the sport for the next generation, and yet it was difficult to say that’s what made the Warriors the Warriors. When a team has so much of everything, it’s easier to take for granted just how compelling it can be to watch one man shoot a basketball.
Now, amidst the greatest shooting stretch of Curry’s career and probably in the history of basketball, it’s the relative nothingness Golden State is operating with these days that makes what Curry’s doing even more validating than most of what we saw in the championship years.
To a degree, the Warriors were always a must-watch product from the beautiful basketball that sprouted into an instant title favorite in 2014-15 to the addition of Kevin Durant and then the disintegration of their chemistry and their physical health in the 2019 Finals loss to Toronto. At any point in any of those seasons, you knew Curry was capable of one of those nights where the ball was going to go in from everywhere he wanted to shoot it.
But even that wasn’t as extraordinary as what Curry’s done over the last three weeks, to the point where the Warriors – a team going nowhere this season – are once again the league’s can’t-miss attraction.
Who knows how long this level can continue, but it seems like every time out, we’re getting transcendent stuff from Curry. You can’t blink, can’t turn away. And oddly, it’s because everything else about Golden State feels so futile that there’s more gravity to this than a garden variety Steph hot streak.
Since returning from a two-week absence due to a tailbone injury, with his team close to freefalling out of the playoff race, Curry has shot 157 threes in just 11 games. Almost half of them – 78 – have gone in. In the last five games, he’s cranked it to even another level, making 10 threes four times. Keep in mind that only one other player in NBA history – his teammate Klay Thompson – has more than three games for their entire career with 10 made threes.
Four or five years ago, a run like this wouldn’t have resonated quite the same way. It would have felt like just another marker of how inevitable the Warriors were. Because we all would have known that whether Curry was scorching the sun for a stretch or just churning out his normal 43 percent made no real difference to the underlying reality that the Warriors were the best team in the NBA. Now, it means everything. When Curry is on the floor this season, the Warriors have out-scored their opponents by a modest margin. But when he sits, they get out-scored by seven points per 100 possessions – an abject disaster that makes Golden State one of the worst teams in the NBA.
There’s no mystery to this. Klay Thompson hasn’t played a minute of professional basketball since Game 6 of the 2019 Finals. Draymond Green is a diminished player on the offensive end since entering his 30s. No. 2 overall pick James Wiseman had a somewhat underwhelming impact as a rookie and then got hurt.