Understanding Stephen Curry’s historic season

What Stephen Curry is doing on the basketball court this year has been nothing short of amazing. He’s been must-see appointment television through the opening few weeks of the season, leading the Golden State Warriors to a torrid start that has them looking nearly unstoppable.

As the great Bill Nye used to say, consider the following:

As of this weekend, Curry’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is hovering around 28, good enough for third in the NBA, trailing only Russell Westbrook and Anthony Davis. A PER of 28 is excellent, but is actually a slight drop-off from where Curry was last week, when his PER was sitting at an astronomical 34.7. To fully understand how ridiculous a PER of 34.7 is, know that it would smash the current single-season PER record (31.8, by Wilt Chamberlain in 1963). We’re not just talking about another MVP year from the Golden State guard; we are talking about a potentially historic campaign, one that could go down as the greatest individual single-season performance the league has ever seen.

It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that comparing players from different eras — a fun way to kill an hour or two with your fellow hoops-obsessed friends — is a difficult endeavor, even when using advanced statistics. The rules of the game have always been evolving — the addition of the three-point line, the elimination of hand-checking, the introduction of zone defense, etc. — and the players of today, groomed for stardom since adolescence, beneficiaries of modern medical knowledge and precise training regimens, look almost superhuman compared to the players of yesteryear. It’s not that comparisons can’t be made, but doing so requires plenty of caveats; a current player and a player from decades ago can’t just be propped up and analyzed in a vacuum. Too much has changed. (This doesn’t even get into the problem posed by the utter lack of video highlights from the NBA’s first few decades. While advanced statistics provide much more depth than traditional statistics, video footage adds needed context to a box score. Going off numbers sans highlights seems inadequate.)

In a strange way, though, Curry’s game, rooted as it is in dead-eye shooting and precision passing, skirts around some of the challenges of generation-to-generation translatability in a way that, for example, LeBron’s game doesn’t. Players like LeBron — whose personal best single-season PER is 31.67, by the way — possess the physical attributes to dominate in any era. Trying to picture LeBron playing in the 1970s isn’t all that fun as a thought experiment because of course LeBron would dominate the league in the 1970s. Heck, he’d dominate the court in the 2070s. The same goes for guys like Shaq and MJ and Kobe. This is not to downplay their skills and reduce their successes to predictable results stemming from genetic luck. But it’s undeniable that sheer physical prowess, the sort of jaw-dropping athleticism that seems almost unfair, undergirds those players’ games.

Curry, on the other hand, plays a brand of basketball that the average fan, the sort of person who likely played hoops as a child or teenager, can more easily relate to than the above-the-rim style exhibited by the likes of Jordan. He’s quick and agile, sure, but his dynamic on-court movements seem less a byproduct of rare, untouchable athleticism and more the sort of abilities honed by years of drills. He’s far from being the biggest, the strongest, the most physically imposing. His physical gifts don’t seem anomalous. Go down to your local gym and you’ll find a slew of players who look every bit as physically blessed as the Golden State guard.

It’s Curry’s physical normalcy and his fundamentally sound game that make him fun to toss into the hypothetical basketball time machine. Because make no mistake about it: despite the spectacular nature of his highlights, Curry possesses a mastery of the fundamentals seen in the likes of legends like Tim Duncan. It’s impossible to shoot with his level of accuracy without having perfected all the small mechanics of shooting the ball: the proper footwork, the elbow positioning, the flick of the wrist, etc. Curry is able to sink absurd off-balance shots with a defender in his face because he’s mastered, to almost previously unforeseen levels, all the basics. He doesn’t overwhelm defenses with athleticism; he outmaneuvers them, is able to think one step ahead because so many of the small, fundamental things a player has to do with the ball in his hands are second nature to him, ingrained deep in his subconscious from years of focused practice.

This is the joy of watching Curry play basketball. His style of play is mesmerizing, yes, but it doesn’t seem as intrinsically otherworldly as, say, Jordan’s did. When you watch Curry hit three after three after three, the ball dive-bombing the net, you are reminded of all the times you could’ve stayed after practice in sixth grade to work on your shooting form but instead opted to go play NBA Live with your buddies. Curry’s ball handling reminds you of all the cone-weaving drills you learned at basketball camp but ceased doing once it became your responsibility to erect cones in your driveway and do the drills yourself. His is a game you can appreciate and marvel at because, as phenomenal as it is, it isn’t a game entirely beyond your understanding. Many people who grew up playing basketball could never dunk, yet everybody has shot a three or done a behind-the-back dribble. Curry’s game is extraordinary in how it’s rooted in the ordinary, the familiar.

So while it feels strange to try to definitively say that Curry’s having the greatest season of all time — although his end-of-the-year numbers may very well prove that to be true, or at least arguable — it feels more comfortable to say that he’s having one of the most spectacular years in basketball history. Part of that is bolstered by the fact Curry plays in the era of highlights popping up in Vine form on Twitter a minute after they happen in the actual game, those clips then spreading like wildfire through the world of blogs and social media, taking on a strange life of their own, every highlight carrying it’s own weight and meaning. This gets at the aforementioned idea about the contextual necessity of highlights and video footage. By being able to watch all of Curry’s best plays, it becomes easier to compare and contrast each individual play with what’s stored in your personal mental library of highlights throughout the ages.

And what’s immediately noticeable is that Curry, as great as he is, doesn’t seem superhuman. He doesn’t seem imposing, yet he’s still dominant, still playing at a level above his peers. Curry’s greatness is the sort that reminds you, as Blake Griffin pointed out in a recent interview, of the best players you played against growing up, the guys who were superstars for their age — not necessarily because they were the biggest and the strongest, but rather the most purely skilled. Those who, for whatever reason, never realized their full potential, their on-court displays of wizardry remembered by a select few, perhaps only memorialized in shaky camcorder footage. Curry is spectacular because he’s the teenager swishing three after three into a homemade hoop nailed to the side of the garage, the best player in the county (and the county one over), the young man who causes high school gyms in nowhere towns to swell to capacity — only he’s doing it at a professional level. Watching Curry is like watching a legend — a legend as in lore — unfold in real-time. It’s small-town basketball stardom, the 30-point games nobody sees, presented under the lights of the biggest stage of all, there for everyone to witness and remember.

Curry’s greatness is tangible, comprehensible. It’s rooted in the little things every person who has ever picked up a ball can understand. And that’s exactly what makes Stephen Curry so astounding.