The Roar
The Roar

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Stephen Curry is back to playing like the NBA’s best

Steph Curry is back to his best for the Warriors.
Expert
7th February, 2017
4

The most successful regular season in NBA history and one of the greatest individual seasons of all time may ultimately serve as the darkest stain on Stephen Curry’s legacy.

Numbers are things you have to look up, but moments are forever embedded in the memory. And the most striking moments of the 2015-16 season came at Curry’s expense.

The finals were LeBron James’ coronation and Curry’s abdication. They were an affirmation of greatness, and its meek withdrawal.

Until the finals, last season was Curry’s stage, his platform for magical, absurdist theatre. Everything else shrunk, and then crumbled, under the arc of his perfect shot.

He didn’t dominate games as much as he became them, wholly and entirely. Everything on the court emanated from his presence. At 6’3 in a sport of giants, he was always the game’s most overbearing, fearsome figure.

It was a season of transcendence that not even LeBron has touched. There have always been ways to at least pretend to contain the greatest player since Michael Jordan. You could play off him and give him acres of space to hit his imperfect jumper. Over time you would lose that way, like the Spurs did in the 2013 finals, but there were and continue to be strategies against James that give you the hint of life.

Curry did not allow for hints. He dealt only in emphatic answers: he lives, you die. He was a threat from the moment he crossed half court, sometimes before that.

Then the finals happened, a disappointment of historic proportions, with Curry’s fall from ‘overseer of the universe’ to ‘man on Earth’ a key ingredient of Golden State’s defeat.

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The greatness of his opponents and his own ailing knee didn’t absolve Curry from his poor performance. He was reckless at times, timid or inattentive at others. He played the whole finals under a strange malaise, one that stretched into the first two months of this season.

Kevin Durant’s arrival on basketball’s biggest present-day stage pushed Curry further into the background. Durant prospered to Curry’s detriment, with the two-time MVP deferring to the one-time MVP. Once the central figure of the entire league, and arguably of the entire American sports scene, Curry became the clear second option on his own team.

So much of Curry’s brilliance is built off insanity and audacity. When he succeeds, he’s the most unprecedented and unlikely offensive player we’ve ever seen. When he fails, he can look brash and imprudent.

With Durant, perhaps the game’s greatest pure scorer, standing next to him, Curry seemed suffocated by an existential crisis. His identity is inextricable from the ridiculousness of his barely-past-half-court threes, his step-back launches where the rim isn’t even in sight and his circus layups. But those shots became harder to justify when could have been distributed to the eminently more graspable brilliance of Durant. Curry became submissive as a result, afflicted by the anxieties that never plagued Russell Westbrook.

Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James is defended by Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry

But the magnificence of Curry is tied to the fact that his ludicrousness is not irresponsible. He takes shots that would tie a rookie to the bench for a week, but he makes them with unimaginable regularity. Curry’s legacy will be that he rendered the absurd into something predictable, and in that transformation no excitement was ever lost

Curry, seemingly with a little prodding from Durant and Steve Kerr, has become himself again over the past six weeks. Since the Christmas Day fiasco, the nadir of Curry’s star, he’s been putting up numbers virtually identical to last season.

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He’s running more pick and roll, taking more shots (in January he averaged five more shots per game than he did in December), and hitting them at a higher clip. He’s playing uninhibited basketball – returning to the playground after too much time wearing a suit.

All the Curry staples are back – the deep, deep threes to beat the shot clock, the double-clutch launches from way back that go in anyway, the drunken drives and immaculate finishes that sober up defences, and the half-court buzzer-beating heaves that kiss the bottom of the net.

The Warriors, like Curry, are incredible but flawed. They’ll have games like they did in Sacramento where the shots just don’t fall, where complacency becomes crippling and a superstar big man (the rationalists can burn, I don’t care whether he’s a head case or not, DeMarcus Cousins is so freaking good I want him on my team) exploits their lack of traditional size.

But the Warriors stayed in that game because of Curry’s shot-making, and they ultimately fell short because of his missed shots at the end. They’re his team again, and more times than not, that will mean victory, and it will mean a much more ecstatic, compelling path to getting there.

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