Curry’s hot streak transcendent because Warriors feel so futile
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, amid 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 he’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 the Toronto Raptors.
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 free-falling 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% 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 outscored their opponents by a modest margin. But when he sits, they get outscored by seven points per 100 possessions – an abject disaster that makes Golden State one of the worst teams in the NBA. Without Curry, the Warriors offense completely disintegrates. There’s no mystery to this. 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. That leaves Andrew Wiggins, Kelly Oubre and Jordan Poole as Golden State’s most reliable offensive players, a trio you’d be more likely to find playing big minutes on a team in the lottery. There is no option for the Warriors other than Curry firing away, as many times as he can and from whatever opportunity he can create.
Inevitably, Curry’s performance in this 10-game stretch going into Wednesday, combined with the Warriors winning five of their last six to hang around Dallas and Memphis for the No. 7 and No. 8 spot in the West, has led to an MVP discussion.
But that’s almost beside the point. Curry has already won the award twice, and yet there wasn’t a stretch from either of those seasons that will be as memorable as the time he put a bad Warriors team on his back and started making everything in sight.
We don’t know when this streak is going to end, but we already know how. Within the next month, the Warriors will either lose in the NBA’s play-in tournament or in a first-round series to one of the league’s elite teams. Curry’s heroics can only go so far.
But watching it unfold will be as compulsory as most of the five Finals the Warriors played in at their peak.
Curry’s place in history has never really been up for debate, but seeing him perform like this amid the rubble of a wrecked roster adds something to his credentials he never could have gotten otherwise.