NEW SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLET SUITS CURRY
At some point between Stephen Curry’s arrival in the NBA and his emergence as league MVP, his Davidson teammate and college roommate, Bryant Barr, noticed a change in him.
Curry stopped interacting with fans on Twitter.
“That second or third year in the NBA when he was having an injury-prone year, he started making an effort to connect with fans and go above and beyond and not just post things or reply once in a while but go deep with fans, and you know his audience skyrocketed. It was from 100K users on Twitter to a million in about 18 months,” Barr said.
“And then in the last couple of years, I started to see his activity go down, and we started having conversations about it, and I asked why it was, and his response was, ‘It’s just too much of a hassle, it’s too much noise. There’s too much friction to make it worthwhile to spend time doing this.’ ”
Barr, who formerly worked at Nike and is attending business school at Stanford, said the complaint sparked an idea to team with fellow Nike alum Jason Mayden to create a new type of communication platform for his former roommate to be able to connect with fans again.
Slyce, which debuted last month, is a social platform allowing influencers — such as Curry — to sift through questions and topics to find ones they want to address. In Curry’s first Q&A with fans, the Slyce team used a filter to find questions about things he wanted to discuss, such as the Carolina Panthers.
Switching social platforms is a minor way that Curry’s life has changed since his rise to the top of the NBA over the past two seasons. He’s essentially the same polite guy who tries hard to answer reporters’ questions, signs an endless number of autographs for fans and only seems to anger when funneling motivation onto the basketball court.
But the entourage surrounding him is bigger, the crowds feistier and the critics much louder. In Toronto, while waiting in the hallway as Curry walked to the court for the NBA All-Star Game, one bystander commented loudly that the Golden State Warriors guard “isn’t even that good anyways.” Curry, with a focused look on his face, couldn’t have possibly not heard — but he continued on, staring straight ahead. The recent critical comments from former NBA players such as Oscar Robertson have grown bad enough that his coach has to shoot them down in news conferences.
Slyce, of which Curry is an investor and co-founder, gives him a chance to finally talk about what he wants to talk about: the Panthers, golf, his charitable work and topics other than basketball.
It’s also a way, Curry said, to take back just a bit of control of his own voice amid the chaos that surrounds the team this season. Sure, he’s helping out his college roommate, but it does seem like he wants to talk about something other than basketball.
“It’s just kind of having control of your own voice,” he said. “After games when you’re in front of the media they’re just asking questions that will just filter into stories that they’ve already written — they just need a quote or maybe stirring the pot in a direction that you don’t want to go — so I think the Q&As, it’s a release to talk about normal stuff and do it more efficiently that became necessary, too.”