Is he a mirage? Is he one of a kind? Is he the future do-it-all in basketball? Small, shifty, highly skilled, deadly, uncatchable, unstoppable, unbreakable. After Jordan, after LeBron, the greatest wonder kid of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Steph Curry is doing it all on the court—mesmerizing, spectacular. This column was written a week ago, but I lost it to a computer glitch. Not irretrievably, it turned out. I have recovered nearly all of it. A week-old story can do justice to a timeless icon.
Something spectacular is happening in the National Basketball Association. Last year’s champion, the Golden State Warriors, are putting on a terrific, eye-popping show; they are on a 21-0 roll after claiming their latest victim on Saturday, the Toronto Raptors. It is the best start ever in NBA history, perhaps in all of professional sports, by any team, and it is not because its interim coach Luke Walton, subbing indefinitely for the ailing Steve Kerr, has suddenly blossomed into a genius of a strategist on the bench.
These Warriors have not lost a game since June of last season. Rick Barry, the NBA Hall of Famer and a legend among these Warriors, says that eventually “they’re going to lose a basketball game, obviously. When that’s going to happen, I don’t know.”
No one else does, not Walton, not the numerous bench analysts and game experts on television who can’t seem to believe that a twenty-one-0 is possible in this day and age. But it is.
Stephen Curry has willed it so. His game is not about power but something higher, about skills, about lifting basketball to a new level—and we, gravity-bound mortals with the basketball savvy of a Sunday sandlot leaguer, could only look up to his celestial brightness, like the ancient men looking up to the heavens, awed by the brightest star, wondering if it were ever reachable.
No NBA player during the last four decades or so of my being a rabid NBA fan has had more 40-point games through the five weeks of the season, seven at the last count. Or produced such hard-court wizardry that he could turn a road arena into what the New York Times calls a “cozy backyard with the friendliest of rims.”
The Warriors were in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Wednesday. Steph’s father, Dell, began the night as the honoree, the man with the Midas touch from three-point range when the son was a runt lost in the folds of the lower stands of the city’s old arena. On this night, resplendent in a pinstripe suit, he just as soon faded back into being another fired-up fan.
He watched the Steph Curry show like he was in awe of a shower of fireworks cascading from deep in the canopy of the Time Warner Cable Arena. The son came to honor the father—the Charlotte franchise’s career-leading scorer—and he did it best in the third quarter. He awed the crowd with his 28-point explosion that featured an “exhilarating flurry of long-range exactitude.”
Over three minutes and 42 seconds Curry scored 19 points, turning an eight-point Warriors’ lead into a clinical 21-point rout. “He had blitzed the buzz out of the Charlotte Hornets with 40 points over all in a shade over 30 minutes played–40 points on 18 shots from the field, 14 made,” the Times added.
How do you stop #30? He’s virtually unstoppable, says Barry, who averaged 27 points per game in his postseason career. “I’ve never seen a player play the game with the skills and talents that Steph Curry has… It’s just remarkable,” he says. A player like him is in the category of an “anomaly,” just like Charles Barkley or LeBron James before him.
The recently retired Steve Nash, himself a great shooter and excellent playmaker, looks at the great Warriors’ run as the evolution of small ball in the NBA. The Warriors’ small ball lineup turned the tide in Games Five and Six of last year’s NBA Finals against LeBron and his Cavaliers.
Curry epitomizes the player with the right skills in the right place at the right time. “The speed, range, dexterity, going left, going right, leaning, fading. It feels like the possibilities are limitless,” Nash told the Toronto Star. “I feel like I could shoot the ball in as wide an array of ways as anybody, but he’s been able to do it with more range and more speed. It’s remarkable.”
Nash calls it “a leap.” Sure, Steph is shooting the ball more, a lot of volume but at an acceptable rate. To take the shots that Curry takes, “even without the accuracy, is a revolution,” Nash concludes. “And then the accuracy. It’s remarkable.”
The Warriors’ offense, it now appears, is part of that evolutionary process set in motion in the early 2000s by a fateful NBA decision. The league allowed the zone defense and removed hand checking on the perimeters. The NBA offenses became up-tempo; they got up shots before the defense could set; they used the three to “create space and pull defenders away from the paint.”
Curry’s genius is this: he has the ability to shoot off the catch or the dribble; he opens up looks inside because of the spacing he creates. He is a shooter with great passing skills. All of these make him “perfect” for a modern offense. “It looks easy,” says Nash, “but the shots he takes are insane.”
After that sizzling game in Charlotte, Curry sought out his old coach at Davidson College, a private liberal arts college, some 20 miles north the city. It has an enrollment of about 1,800 students. His old coach, Bob McKillop, is now 65, gray and slender. When he saw Steph watching the Davidson-UNC game, he called him “Baryshnikov in the stands.”
It is still recalled that when none of the big-timers from the state’s Atlantic Coast Conference titans would give Steph a shot, McKillop took a “chance on a baby-faced 160-pound teenager out of Charlotte Christian.”
The future court royalty could not even “get a sniff” from North Carolina’s Roy Williams and Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, the state’s celebrity coaches.
That was a decade ago. How could they have missed the best of them all?