The singular genius of Steph Curry

Bruce Fraser, coach of the Golden State Warriors, said some interesting things in an interview last  week (link):

• Steph Curry ends every practice by shooting 100 threes.  
• Last season, Curry hit 77 consecutive three pointers in practice.  
• Curry dropped by a camp at Kezar a couple weeks ago, walked onto the court in street clothes, no warmup...and hit 23 of 25 three pointers.

So much for my bright idea, which was to simply not defend Curry.  What's he going to do, score 120 points?  Well, yes, he could do that, if, as Fraser reports, his unguarded shooting percentage on threes is in the 80-90% range.  That's, like...horrifying.

Curry came to mind again last night as I watched a clip of LeBron, who was asked who he thought were the greatest basketball players of all time.  "Jordan," he said automatically, then hemmed and hawed before adding Bird and Erving.  I'd seen a clip a few weeks ago where Kareem - who is the only person with six MVP awards - dodged the question, although he then mentioned Bird, Oscar Robertson and Russell.  I wondered how close Curry is to those guys.  Remember, four years ago Curry was just a good player, before turning into a demonic combination of Larry Bird and Tiny Archibald.

I think Kareem - who Bill Simmons ranked first in his Big Book of Basketball - overstates the difficulty of identifying at least a group of candidate "greatest" players.  For one thing, I don't think there's much chance that the greatest player ever - whomever it turns out to be - failed to win a single MVP award.  You can make your arguments for Pete Maravich or Bob Lanier or Tracy McGrady, but in the end, if people weren't convinced that you were the greatest player for a single year, how can you be the greatest of all time?

You can make a similar argument through time.  If a player had a fifteen year career and made three all-star teams, I don't think that's a "greatest"-type performance.  You can plot those two things together and some interesting things emerge right away:

It's pretty obvious where Simmons is coming from on Kareem.  Kareem has more MVPs than Jordan or Russell, more All-Star games than Kobe or Erving.  He was one of the best basketball players in the world for two decades, and if you are counting rings he has six, same as MJ and Pippen (tied for best among non-Celtics, except for the remarkable Big Shot Rob, who has seven).  

Curry is a peculiar outlier here.  No other MVP has been to as few All-Star games.  (I am giving him, LeBron, Westbrook and Durant credit for 2017-18, as I suspect all four will make the team.)

Curry is older (29) than most people realize - six months older than Durant.  In Curry's rookie season, where he showed some promise, Durant was already first-team NBA, scoring champion, and had been Rookie of the Year two years before.  Where Durant played one year of college ball before the Sonics drafted him, Curry played three - and remember no major college program offered Curry a scholarship.  As for LeBron:

So Curry's subsequent escalation came as a bit of a shock, not just to fans, but to his peers.  If you plot yearly Box Plus/Minus for LeBron, Durant, and Curry, it's obvious (at least to me) why people had trouble taking him seriously at first.  He came almost out of nowhere, but just kept getting better. That his "off year" last year brought him back in line with LeBron and Durant.  As off years go, that's not bad:

Box Plus/Minus is by no means perfect, but as a general indicator of player quality I think it's usually in the right neighborhood.  Here is a chart of the modern MVP winners that plots Box Plus/Minus vs. All-Star games (note that we don't have BPM for the first four years of Kareem's career, and those would probably pull his average up some):

Curry lacks the longevity of most of the other greats, and will lack it even if he continues like this for a few more years.  Westbrook, who is a comparable individual talent and about the same age as Curry, is better-positioned to move into the middle of the Pantheonic data cloud.  Note that as their careers progress, Curry, Westbrook, Durant, and also LeBron will move south-east, as their current BPMs do not include the decline phase of their career.

Still, if you want to understand the singular genius of Curry, this framework highlights how incredibly unusual he is.

It fashionable now to talk about how the Warriors are overloaded with talent, and how unusual it is to see two epic Bird/Olajuwon/Kareem-type talents on the same team. When else has that happened? Well...almost all the time, actually.  From the chart we have:

• Magic / Kareem
• Erving / Moses
• Kobe / Shaq
• Don't sleep on Nash / Nowitzki!
• Westbrook/Durant of course

You could also add:

• Jerry West / Wilt Chamberlain
• Bill Russel / Cousy or Sam Jones or...
• Jordan / Pippen (who never never won an MVP award because Michael but whose career looked a lot like Durant's so far)
• Karl M / Stockton (who never never won an MVP award because Magic and Michael but whose career looked a lot like Nowitzski's)

So who's the greatest of all time?  One of these guys, probably.  I think I'd draw a horizontal line at Kobe, and say no one below that level is GOAT.  From there...I dunno, but if you take BPM really seriously...

• It's LeBron #1 and Jordan #2,
• Bird and Magic were basically the same guy, and tied for #3,
• Holy crap Erving > Kareem and pretty much everyone else,
• Curry, Westbrook, and Durant are now officially in the conversation.

Appendix
Here is a list of all NBA players by number of All-Star appearances:  (link)
Here is a list of all the best ABA and NBA seasons by Box Plus/Minus: (link)