Steph Curry says he plays better when hes feeling joyous. But how will the leagues best shooter face the postseason after his teams unprecedented collapse in last years NBA finals? Andrew Corsello asks Curry how he keeps his cool and swats away the nightmares as he tries to set the record straight about which franchise is the most dominant force in basketball.
e doesnt pass the eye test. He never has. I know this about him going inthe coaches and scouts who dismissed him because he didnt play right, didnt act right, didnt look right. One early scouting report reads like a series of taunts from the Bully of the Beach in the old Charles Atlas comic strips:
Far below NBA standard in regard to explosiveness and athleticismextremely smallneeds to add some muscles to his upper body, but appears as though hell always be skinnynot a natural point guard that an NBA team can rely on to run a team.
And yet when I meet the man this spring, at the Golden State Warriors practice facility, my eyes tell me what they tell me and I think, like so many before me, and quite stupidly: Uh, I thought Stephen Curry would be bigger.
As I lurk behind the goalpost, dazzled and half hypnotized by the shhhick!shhhick!shhhick! (a sound sibilant and crisp and, somehow, grinning) as he sinks 35 three-point shots in a row, the nay-saying thoughts about Curry and the Goliaths hes going to meet in the playoffs assert themselves. His vertical leap is a whole foot shorter than Russell Westbrooks. LeBron James outweighs him by 60 pounds.
Even Curry is not immune to such doubts. Would I have told you my rookie year, Im gonna be MVP someday? No way, he says. I didnt know what the ceiling was.
Does he now? Do we? Curry knows he has unfinished business to attend to this season before any question about his ceiling can be addressed, just as he knows the world is watching and wondering. Yet in practice he radiates nothing but balletic ease. (His record for consecutive threes is 77; he considers any day in which he sinks fewer than 80 out of 100 to be an off day, an ugly day.) The display is impressive, of course, but its also quite beautiful.
Curry himself, even before he gets a basketball in his hands and starts to move, is a beautiful human being. And beautiful, not handsome, is the correct word here. Teammates and opponents both used to describe Michael Jordan as a hard man, and he looked and acted the part: cut from stone, built for combat. Curry, on the other hand, is a Warrior who looks nothing like a warrior. Hes 29 but still baby-faced, with soft sunny features and bright green-gray eyes. Theres an optimistic cast to his facehe looks like hes smiling even when hes not. Or, as Warriors head coach Steve Kerr says, Steph looks like hes 12 years old.
But its the sight of Curry in motion that hypnotizes. The 100-shot progression resembles an étude rather than a drill. One assistant coach, Nick URen, places himself under the hoop, secures each ball after it shhhicks the net, and distributes it to another assistant coach, Bruce Fraserknown as the Curry Whispererwho fires passes to his shooter from different positions, constantly varying angle, speed, and arc. Curry remains in perpetual motion, releasing every three seconds or so, slowly tracing the half orbit of the three-point arc from one corner to the other. The exactitude of his footworkthe way the tips of his Under Armour sneakers depart and land exactly an inch from the arc with every shotcreates the impression that hes negotiating a tightrope, not a painted line.
He doesnt achieve much air on his jump shot. The question that raises (Why arent half this guys shots blocked?) gets answered with every ball Fraser feeds him: The hands! The speed with which Curry can receive a pass and transition it into a shot is simply astonishingto the naked eye he often seems to be volleying, rather than catching, the ball.
Ive always suspected he has extra nerves in his fingertips, says URen. His ability to manipulate and adjust the ball in a fraction of a second, to transition the angle or arc of his shot in response to what a defender is doing, is unlike anything Ive ever seen.
Steph has an almost superhuman ability to micro-self-correct on his own, Fraser adds. But then if one of us says, Try this, hes able to process the change faster than anyone Ive ever seen. Hes the most educable player Ive ever knownboth in terms of his willingness to listen and in his ability to absorb and execute.
That soft touch, that combination of finesse and pliancy of temperamentits Currys singular gift, but its also the source of all the talk over the years that hes, well, soft. Its instructive (and unavoidable) to compare Curry in this regard to his nemesis. LeBron James, the leagues other generational talent, is an unstoppable blunt-force trauma of a player, but he has none of Currys silkiness and grace. Theres something dancerly about Currys athleticism. Hes one of the few players in the history of the game capable of producing the illusion that he can change the direction of his body after leaving the ground.
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The one downside to Stephen Curry, if you insist on looking for one, Fraser says, is that he sometimes loses focus. Its true: Throughout the drill, Currys eyes are everywhere. Draymond Green is 40 feet away, telling a reporter that despite the double technical he landed the week before, I am not a bad boy, Im just Draymond!and Curry chimes in, Sright, Dray! Tell em! Kevin Durant is down the floor practicing pirouettes, ball in hand, to improve his balance and core strengthand Curry finds the time to chirp, Dance, KD, dance! The three-point arc no longer evokes a tightrope so much as a satellite dish with which Curry insists on receiving every stray transmission in his environment.
Fraser says there are two reasons for Currys distractibility: One, because everything is so easy for him. And two, because hes got this childlike quality, which can cause him to lose focus more than some of the others. The thing is, even though this kid in him sometimes hurts him, its also his best quality, because it makes him joyful. And when Stephen Curry is joyful, he is an assassin.
Its a revealing observation, given that the Warriors ended last years season with what was arguably the greatest loss of focus in NBA historybecoming the first team to blow a championship series after leading three games to one. I gave it a lot of thought, and it was like a recurring nightmare for a while, Curry tells me. But then, you know, you live your life and do your thing.
As the Warriors head toward a seemingly inevitable third championship series against the Cavs, the question is whether Curry doing his thing is going to cut it. Can finesse and joy, no matter how fine, no matter how joyful, ever again be enough to take down the big bully in the east?
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On paper, Stephen Currys last two seasons have been what statisticians term just straight-up stupid. In 2015, he won his first ring and MVP honors after setting an NBA single-season record of 286 three-point shots. He then doubled down in the off-season (those Cirque du Soleil drills where he dribbles a basketball with one hand while juggling a tennis ball with the other!) and returned staggeringly better in 2016, repeating as MVP while contending for the leagues most-improved honor. To stick some metrics on it: Curry bettered his points-per-game average by 6.3 while going Bob Beamon on his own three-point record, raising the tally from 286 to 402. Four hundred and two.
Yet the numbers, garish as they are, cant speak to the full Curry effect. Truly great basketball players, the kind that come around only two or three times a decade, have the ability to decide, usually in the fourth quarter, when their team is down and its now or never, to flip a switch. Magic, Bird, and Jordan could do it. LeBron can do it. Curry can, toobut, as is so often the case with him, in a new and different way. With LeBron, the thought balloon above his head invariably says one thing: Its up to me. Im taking over. The level of ego is as colossal as it is justified.
When Stephen Curry takes over, the moment presents differently. Sometimes, he puts himself in the captains seat, as in Game 4 of last years Western Conference Semifinals against the Trail Blazers, when he scored 17 points in the five-minute overtime periodanother NBA record. (After the game, Charles Barkley, a frequent Curry critic, described what hed just seen perfectly: That. What I. That. That was a. That. That was on.) Other times, Klay Thompson or Kevin Durant or Draymond Green is for all appearances the one taking chargealthough its unmistakably, if indescribably, clear that Curry is the one engineering the takeover. Its as if theres a hive mind at work, with Curry the first among equals. At times, the Warriors choreography becomes so much faster than the speed of thought, so intricately loomed, that the score almostalmostseems besides the point.
A lot of people who become celebrated athletes were groomed and raised to be in the position theyre in. But that didnt happen with Steph.
I ask Curry what it feels like to orchestrate something like that, and his answer is characteristically modest: Me and Kevin were talking about it on the bench during the fourth quarter yesterday, he says, referring to the 50 points the Warriors scored in the third quarter against the Clippers. There was a moment where me and him took over. It wasnt forced. There was a flow to it. There are times when it happens with this team with more than one person, and sometimes all five. I dont know what it is, but it is veryunusual.
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