Stephen Curry is supposed to be the greatest shooter ever.
Stephen Curry hasn’t changed the game. Rather, he’s a product of the game. The intervallic beauty of his combination of shooting, scoring and playmaking is the result of a decades-long amalgamation of appreciation for the craft, hard work, and abject joy for what you get to do with all things orange and leathery while bounding around a shiny court.
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What’s certain is that he, at just (maybe) 6-3, could be the modern NBA’s perfect avatar. What’s less certain is his place in history, as he’s played just six seasons, with three of those dogged by injury.
What’s more certain is Steve Nash, the retiring NBA legend, calling Stephen Curry the greatest shooter this game has ever seen. From a feature penned by Ric Bucher at Bleacher Report:
"Truly, from the eye test, he's the greatest there's ever been."
Nash then defended (hah!) Curry, who has never been a member of the vaunted 50/40/90 club (field goal percentage, three-point percentage, free throw percentage), something Nash hit an NBA record four times in his career:
"He's probably going to shoot a lower percentage than me his whole career because he's going to take more shots and he should," Nash said. "It's just a difference in mentality. I would shoot a higher percentage than Steph because I was much more conservative. I would try to shoot as high a percentage as possible to save shots for my teammates and then shoot more in the fourth quarter. I had coaches tell me I was hurting our team at times by trying to set up my teammates, but I always thought I got it back by how I made them feel and incorporated them into the offensive scheme and the chemistry of the team. He's capable of that, but he's more inclined to score. There are things he can do that I can't. He's such a beautiful shooter with such an array of shots and such a quick release, you wouldn't want to take that away from him at all."
Curry shot just under 49 percent from the field this season and has hit for just a tick over 47 percent for his career, a remarkable achievement for both someone his size, and someone who takes nearly half his shots from behind the arc. He may never shoot over 50 percent from the field in a season, that vaunted mark that Magic Johnson and John Stockton routinely hit and that most of your uncles presume that Bob Cousy (a career 37 percent shooter) shot from the floor.
No, Stephen is the living, thrilling realization of where we’re at now.
That if you hit half of your shots from inside an arc that some mavericks from the American Basketball League laid down in 1961, that I can outscore you if I hit merely 34 percent of the my shots from outside that line. Of course, 34 percent ain’t enough these days. It ain’t even average. And it’s the equivalent of the Mendoza Line (ask your uncle) for Stephen Curry.
In the same way that LeBron James was supposed to combine the best attributes of both Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson (with a little Jamal Mashburn thrown in, ‘natch), Curry is expected to be the best at what he does. Anything less would be gauche.
His father was one of the NBA’s first great three-point specialists, taking to the role nearly a decade after the line was introduced to the league. This is less about genetics and more about environmental influence, as Stephen watched Dell Curry act as a key spacing cog on several very good teams deep into his late 30s.
From there, and I can’t believe we’re going here … three years in college may have helped.
There should be no doubt: it is usually best for a professional player’s development to practice and play against NBA-level talent as soon as they possibly can. Even if the actual game minutes are scarce, acting as a pro for an entire year with a coaching and training staff at your side, working through even the minimal mid-season practices along the way, helps prepare you far more for a paying gig than some November tournament that sees your coach wearing a funny Hawaiian shirt.
Understanding where to pick your spots as a ball-dominant point guard, as Curry was at Davidson, may have helped much more than, say, jumping to the NBA after one year as an entitled, son-of-an-old-player, shooting specialist. That’s not to say that Stephen Curry was on anyone’s radar after his freshman year of college, far from it, but sometimes getting to act as the Big Man on Campus helps. It hasn’t for most other supreme college scorers, their games didn’t translate fully, at length, or at all, but in Curry’s case (and Nash’s!) it may have been the best route.
He developed his footwork against lesser talents. He steadied his too-high dribble against kids that could edge him off of his preferred angles. He built on what Steve Nash, then absolutely killing it but also too often reining it in, taught all of us – if you are good at shooting this very long shot, then you shoot it. You don’t have to be Steve Kerr or Hubert Davis, waiting for someone else to find you. Shoot it. Even if it drives the scouts crazy or pisses off the guy on his second plate of boneless wings that also picked Davidson to make the Final Four.
His introduction to the NBA, his makeup, his personal heritage and privileged (not in terms of upbringing or attitude, but exposure) status, his setting (Golden State, for better or worse, is where NBA orthodoxy often goes to die) and his skills were made for this. It took a bit, and for those dodgy ankles to round into form, but he became the veritable lamplight in the gunpowder factory.
Whether or not Stephen Curry is the greatest shooter ever is left for your take at the barstool. What we do know is that he’s made for 2015. And we’re all better off for it.
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is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at KDonhoops@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @KDonhoops
