Stephen Curry heard the criticism last week — that his success was due in part to a lack of legitimate perimeter defense in the NBA, that today’s stars do not play tough enough to stop him.
To put it bluntly, no defense in history could have stopped Curry at the end of the Golden State Warriors’ game at Oklahoma City Saturday night.
The score was tied at 118 when Golden State’s Andre Iguodala pulled down a rebound off a missed jumper by the Thunder’s Russell Westbrook with about 6 seconds remaining in overtime. The Warriors could have called a timeout to set up their offense, but Iguodala instead tossed the ball to Curry, who casually made his way across midcourt. Before the Thunder could put together anything resembling a defense against him, Curry launched the ball toward the hoop from more than 32 feet out.
Swish. In addition to beating the rival Thunder, Curry tied the record for the most 3-pointers in a game (12) and broke his own record for most in a season (he has 288 with 24 games to play).
“What was that, 40 feet?” Golden State’s Draymond Green asked reporters after the game. “That’s absurd.”
To put the shot into perspective, consider that the 3-point arc is approximately 23 feet, 9 inches from the basket. By launching the ball so quickly, Curry took the shot well before Andre Roberson, a stout defender for the Thunder, could get back to defend him.
Curry finished with 46 points and in his last four games has averaged 43.8 points a game while shooting 61.1 percent from 3-point range, a rate that was actually better than the 60.8 percent he had shot from the field overall.
For the season, Curry is leading the NBA in scoring at 30.7 points a game, and he appears to be a lock to be the eighth player in NBA history to complete a so-called 50-40-90 season — shooting 50 percent or better from the field, 40 percent or better from 3-point range and 90 percent or better from the free-throw line.
The best in the NBA have given Curry, the NBA’s reigning Most Valuable Player, his due.
Curry “needs to stop it man!!” the Cleveland Cavaliers’ LeBron James wrote on Twitter Saturday night. “He’s ridiculous man! Never before seen someone like him in the history of ball!”
The Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade wrote on his Twitter page, “Curry is UNREAL!!!!”
With all the praise has come the expected criticism. Some veterans of previous eras have jabbed at Curry in an apparent attempt to justify how the game was superior when they played.
Oscar Robertson, a Hall of Famer best known for averaging a triple-double for the Cincinnati Royals in the 1961-62 season, seems intent on writing off Curry’s success as a product of bad defense rather than superior marksmanship.
“When I played years ago, if you shot a shot outside and hit it, the next time I’m going to be up on top of you,” Robertson said on “Mike & Mike,” an ESPN radio show, Thursday. “I’m going to pressure you with three-quarters, half-court defense. But now they don’t do that. These coaches do not understand the game of basketball, as far as I’m concerned.”
Many former players rushed to agree with Robertson that Curry’s success was a result of the deficiencies of his era and that their success was somehow more pure.
Surprisingly, one of the most reasonable viewpoints has come from Isiah Thomas, a Hall of Fame guard for the Detroit Pistons who, with a checkered history as a league executive, has often had his credibility questioned.
Thomas supported Robertson’s assertion that a dearth of perimeter defense was a huge flaw in today’s game, but unlike Robertson and many other critics, Thomas acknowledged that Curry could truly be judged only in the context of his era because there is no way to know how his talent would translate to earlier incarnations of the game.
“The game has changed,” Thomas said on “Mike & Mike” Friday. “You can’t really apply the rules of my era to this one. We have to appreciate what Steph is doing under the rules he’s playing under, and he’s the best player under the circumstances.”
While coach Steve Kerr has been vocal in defending Curry, poking fun at the former stars who have chosen to criticize him, perhaps the best defense came from Andrew Bogut, Golden State’s lumbering center, who mocked the old-timers on Twitter.
“My under 14 team in Melbourne Australia would have beat these @warriors 109-99,” he wrote. “Fat Jimmy would have locked down @StephenCurry30!!!!”
Still, for Curry, who has called the criticism “annoying,” the best response was to take a shot that was indefensible both in the sense that no one should have taken it and in the sense that no one could have stopped it.
When the shot went in, Curry smiled and danced, just like Cam Newton, the star quarterback of Curry’s beloved Carolina Panthers. And like Newton, he did not seem to care if the old-timers found the whole thing off-putting.
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