Steph Curry is probably the best player in basketball right
now; Kevin Durant and Lebron James might be better rebounders, more versatile
defenders, and have more traditional scoring opportunities…but neither one of
them can affect a game quite like Steph Curry.
That fascinates me: two players who are at the peak of their abilities, who are physical specimens and monsters in the game – no, not
Monstars – have been
overtaken by what looks like a skinny little kid flinging up shots with what
seems, at least on the surface, like reckless abandon, who then laughs with glee as they
somehow go in. There is something
absolutely
magnetic about watching
Curry play basketball that forces you to watch him every second he’s on the
floor – even when he doesn’t have the ball in his hands – because something
incredible and at times even unbelievable could happen at any moment.
You
might think that this is because he has already done so many incredible things
on the floor, that we have been Pavlovian-ly trained to expect wondrous things
to just sort of…happen when he
touches the ball; that the attraction of watching him play basketball is simply
a natural, logical conclusion that, as he has amazed us previously, so too will
he amaze us once again. You
would be wrong. It has happened already, when he was
playing for small, unheralded Davidson University – because none of the
blue-chip programs would take him – when the entire country fell in love with
him; and before you insist that this occurred because of his stellar play during the NCAA
tournament, I should remind you that he was already a mainstay in the highlight
reels on all of the nightly sports review – “worldwide leaders” or
otherwise. There was already something
positively electric about watching Steph Curry play basketball, even then: it
was not as refined then, certainly, it had not become the surreal hurricane of
confident expectation – the state in which one sits perched upon the edge of
one’s own seat, the anticipation nearly seeping out of every pore to drip down
onto the end-table and spoil one’s nachos – but it was already there. My younger brother watched him play one
non-tournament college basketball game and declared to me: “That kid is going
to be a hell of a basketball player in the NBA.” It was not then a foregone conclusion that
Steph Curry would even be drafted into the NBA, let alone become a foundational player for a franchise; the Minnesota twins drafted two other point guards in front of him, one of whom - Johnny Flynn - has been a fantastic bust, the other of whom - Ricky Rubio - is a good point guard, but is not even the best player on his own team. Absolutely no one predicted that Curry would become a white-hot
inferno of delicious appeal and consistent amazement. He was too skinny, the pundits assured us, he
had poor shot selection, couldn’t play defense, was too short, they all said;
not maliciously, certainly, but with the sort of melancholy with which the
professional evaluators of basketball talent are wont to dash the lifelong
hopes of young college students.
They
were wrong, of course; not even the experts are really any good at deciphering talent, because basketball is probably the
most difficult sport to forecast. During
Curry’s first season in the NBA, my younger brother and I watched a Warriors
games, during which he turned to me and once again proclaimed: “Steph Curry is
going to be the best basketball player in the NBA.”
All
right, fine, that’s not entirely accurate; what he said was “In four years Steph
Curry might be the best point guard
in the NBA;” but my version sounds better.
Here’s the best part about that prediction: Curry didn’t really even
have that great of a game when my brother made it; he just saw something that
attracted him to Curry’s abilities, which made him feel totally confident in making that
prediction. I, of course, disagreed with
him...because I am an idiot, and I was drinking all the expert Kool-Aid which
assured us that he would never be more than a remixed Keven Martin.
I was
wrong; that’s not a sentence I enjoy typing, especially in regards to
basketball. Steph Curry is not only the
best player in basketball, he’s also the most insanely, completely, ubiquitously
loved player in basketball. Everyone
enjoys watching Steph Curry play basketball; even Clippers fans have nothing
but nice things to say about him.
Cavaliers fans might curse Andrew Bogut, Andre Iguodala, Kelly Olynek
and Kyrie Irving’s Dodgy Kneecap, but they never go so far as to disparage the Baby
Faced Assassin: because even the people whose championship dreams have been
dashed to pieces upon the bay of Golden State, still love the rock upon which their
2015 season died. Lebron James was never
this beloved, neither was Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim
Duncan; no one since Michael Jordan has been this universally loved.
It’s
not Curry’s perfect form on his jump-shot – so pure and consistent that a
volcanic eruption could not alter its inevitable course – which allows him to
hit some of the most ridiculous below-the-rim shots we’ve ever seen; or the
quickness of his release, which Sports Science insists is the quickest in the
NBA at 0.4 seconds from hip-to-tip. It’s
more than just his superlative ball-handling ability; and it
is superlative, by the way. Do you remember last year when there was a
debate among some – not me – about whether Steph or Kyrie was the better
ball-handler? It was
never a debate in
my mind: Curry was quite visibly the better of the twain; which was in no way
disparaging to Mr. Irving, but it did mean that he was only the second or third
best ball-handler in the world, because Chris Paul really does need to be in
that particular discussion somewhere.
Whether he’s 1, 2 or 3 I really don’t know; I just know that he’s in
there, and Steph is ahead of Kyrie.
It’s
not necessarily that Curry
looks better while dribbling, because that's a pretty subjective method by which to rank one's ability, and besides which in some ways he might not: Kyrie certainly has just as visibly appealing of a dribbling style. It
looks flashy, fancy, fascinating, some-other-adjective-that-starts-with-F, and
it is incredibly effective: he uses it equally well to create space for jumps shots
and incredible layups…but Curry is just
better
at creating the space. His dribbles
might not look any better, but they
just
are, because he creates so much more space with each dribble; and he
creates all of that space because he covers more ground with every move. That is the secret to effective ball-handling:
a crossover that travels a greater distance from one side to the other will
always be more effective than one with a smaller range of motion, even if the
speed at which the ball moves is exactly the same. The idea is to get your defender moving in
the wrong direction, to shift his weight in such a way that he leaves a direct
line open for you to attack, and it is so much harder to create that action
when your own feet aren’t moving. Steph
Curry is the best at creating that space: that’s why he can get his shot up off
of any dribble, at any time, from anywhere on the court.
But it’s even more than all of that: the appeal which draws Curry to us, and in turn us to
him, is a nebulous thing which defies rational constructs and the simple, fundamental
precision which makes him such a terrifying basketball player. Kobe Bryant was the best basketball player of
his generation, whose dedication to the precise intricacies of basketball
excellence allowed him to excel at every facet of the game; but he was also
hated by half of the world for his apparent arrogance, legal/societal issues,
and also the fact that he played on the Lakers, whom we all hated as a matter of course. Wake up, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, hate the Lakers, ho-hum... Tim Duncan, the only player who can reasonably be argued was a greater
player in their generation than Kobe, also excelled at the fundamentals – hence
his famous gamer-tag The Big Fundamental – but he was overlooked and ignored,
because his excellence seemed so boring
to some. But no one – literally no one – hates Steph: because he is the
living embodiment of Basketball Charisma in our generation.
The
best way to describe this is through the medium of the NBA All-Star Weekend
Slam Dunk contest. Every few years, a
contestant comes along who just sort of…well, blows the doors of the gym off
like he was dropping a nuclear bomb through the net, rather than a
leather-covered chunk of rubber which has been pumped full of air. Think about Zach Lavine last year, and Blake
Griffin before him. Remember when Dwight
Howard won the contest with that cape?
He won a slam dunk contest with a shot that
was technically a lay-up! But it
didn’t matter, because for some un-quantifiable reason, when he “dunked” that ball,
it just…
mattered more than when
anyone else did it. It felt almost
important, significant in some way outside of the context in which it occurred –
which, for the record, was tens-of-thousands of slightly tipsy folks paying
money to watch a very large man drop a child’s toy through a metal ring – and so
every single dunk attempt raised the anticipation of every individual
spectator, who both transferred and received a small percentage of that magnetism
to and from those standing on either side of him. It’s the same phenomenon by which a group of
intelligent, compassionate, and rational people can become the chaotic vortex
of anger and hate which we generally call a “mob,” except now directed towards a
positive end.
It turns out that charisma and emotion are
contagious, and certain people are more communicable than others. Steph Curry transmits more of it than anyone
since Michael Jordan; before him, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were the twin
pillars of excitement, and they were preceded by the superlative Dr. J, Julius
Irving. It’s the same phenomenon which
turned Pete Maravich into the Pistol, and is the reason why Adidas still sells
shorts which have been stitched with his name, and why I still watch Youtube videos in terrible
quality of a man who had retired before I was even born: because for some
reason, Pistol Pete playing basketball transmitted more joy to those watching
it than anyone not already named in this paragraph.
Steph Curry is the best player in the NBA right now, but he’s so much
more: he is the living conduit through which all of the joy of a perfectly
swished jump shot, is transmitted to those of us watching it. He is everyone’s
favorite player, even if you don’t really like his team; he is the
Baby-Faced Assassin, the new generation’s NBA John Wayne. He is the Living Embodiment of the Literal Definition of Awesome...and he’s
just getting started.
Even then, they got just lucky enough
to accomplish it, as the 1996-1997 season demonstrated, in which they started the season even stronger than
they had the previous year, but after suffering injuries to multiple
contributors – including DennIs Rodman, Tony Kucoc, and Bill Wennington – their
frontcourt was so decimated that they had to sign Brian Williams in the middle
of the season, a player to whom no other
team in the league felt like paying actual money to play basketball, until
the Bulls were forced to do so. That team still won 69 games, but really only
because they made the conscious choice to try and win 70 games in consecutive
seasons. 
