The Weekside: Steph Curry is the best player ever

When it comes to basketball, Bill Simmons wrote an excellent book. His 800-page tome exemplified his refusal to be edited like nothing before it while the repetitious misogyny and porn star references read like a cry for help. But in terms of hoops, he did his research and laid out the history of the sport adeptly in his encyclopedic Book of Basketball.

One thing that stood out, however, was how Simmons only discussed the game as it has been played within the structure of the NBA. His player value assessments were entirely aligned with how well a player performed within the rigid confines of 82-game season completed by the postseason tournament of 7-game series that determines the champion.

This makes sense. If your goal is to rank the greatest players in NBA history — the book’s mission — then what other viewpoint matters? His is a chronicle of what has happened in league history and who thrived the most within that organizational structure.

Of course, that structure is simply made up.

The way champions are decided could have gone any number of ways. March Madness, for example, is different and produces a different way of viewing greatness. In a single-game elimination tournament, it is better understood that many fantastic players come up short. We also tend to remember single-game performances more.

There are dozens of other ways that a basketball league could be set up. Each would alter perceptions and legacies. So it is important to recognize that our outlook on a player’s greatness is inherently tied to his accomplishments within the structure of the NBA.

On the other hand, someone who often came up short within that system will always seem lacking when measured up to his peers who were able to thrive under such a structure.

There is an argument, however, that an 82-game regular season, in which you face a new, lesser prepared opponent every few days, is actually a better measure of pure basketball ability.

When you get into a 10-week marathon of 7-game series, more outside-of-basketball factors creep in. An ability to study film is a big one. Concentration levels over weeks are tested. Nowadays, looking through analytics — for example, learning what percentages the opponent shoots from certain areas of the floor — is almost mandatory.

When viewing greatness and achievement through the lens of the NBA system, we are baking these talents into the mix alongside pure on-court ability. That isn’t a bad thing. It’s just a thing.

And it is why I differentiate between which players are the greatest and which players are the best.

Two players who epitomize this are Reggie Miller and Tracy McGrady. There is no doubt that, by the standards of greatness — looking at a player’s full career, accomplishments, focus, professionalism, legacy — that Miller is the more highly regarded. But there is equally no reasonable way to argue that Reggie Miller was better at basketball than Tracy McGrady.

If that last sentence makes you squirrelly, I  don’t know how to explain it to you.

McGrady was simply a force of nature on the court and could do everything on offense. He was unstoppable for years and years and years to the point that many thought he was better than Kobe Bryant in the days when they were the two best perimeter players walking planet earth.

But there is the elephant in the room. McGrady either lacked some of the characteristics that help you advance in a 7-game series or simply ran into a bunch of bad luck — perhaps both — so he has dropped a few pegs. Reggie Miller, on the other hand, had moments. He came up large on the largest stages, and it is a lot easier to re-watch footage of 8 points in 9 seconds or his game-winner over Michael Jordan than it is to re-live the five straight regular seasons when there wasn’t a human alive who could even dream of stopping T-Mac from embarrassing him, possession after possession, every single night for 82 straight games.

Again, if you watched both T-Mac and Reggie play and don’t believe that Tracy McGrady is better at basketball, I can’t explain it to you.

Here are some more: Grant Hill is better than James Worthy, Chris Paul is better than John Stockton, and Steph Curry is better than everybody.

Basketball is an evolution.

Things that are routine now hadn’t even been invented or conceived of 20 years ago. If Manu Ginobili was teleported into 1994, his Euro step would blow the world away. But it isn’t just the named moves that are easily identifiable. It’s the every-single-play stuff like step-back jumpers. The things that James Harden does four times on each possession? Nobody could it that back then. It didn’t exist.

It isn’t just the superstars. DeMar DeRozan, for example, is capable of doing every single thing even Michael Jordan could do more or less. He cannot do it with the same expertise, control or poise under pressure. He also lacks MJ’s creativity to finish at the hoop and react to the defense. But fundamentally, the fadeways and pullups and crossovers and everything? He can do all that.

Here is a perfect video to show the progression.

With one dribble, Kevin Durant moves about 10 feet to his left and then plants his foot and torques back about six feet to this right. He covers crazy distance. This journey is helped along by the fact that he is such a giant, gangly, and agile human. But it’s more a product of how basketball has built upon itself.

Michael Jordan never did this. It wasn’t because he wasn’t talented or great enough to do it. It is simply that players since Jordan’s day have further and further stretched the concept of how to efficiently cover territory with the ball.

This is a new way of handling the ball that previous players hadn’t conceived of. That fact doesn’t take away from their greatness any more than not knowing how to drive a car affects the legacy of Abe Lincoln.

There was also a day when few people in the NBA could do a jump stop properly. Now, 12-year-old kids at every basketball camp in the country do it routinely. The knowledge of how to split a double team out of the pick and roll has become second nature to many high school ballhandlers. This was once an impromptu move made by only the most creative NBA players. The teardrop that has evolved as a way to not stop forward motion before taking a shot while driving to the hoop, while certainly not new, is nearing ubiquity among guards in the modern age.

In short, all players now have a skill set that is vastly larger than their predecessors of even 20 years ago. That doesn’t make them greater necessarily. Today’s MIT physicists aren’t greater than Albert Einstein just because they have read about more theories than he ever did or because they have access to computational power he couldn’t fathom. But it does give them a lot of advantages.

Steph Curry has all these advantages.

And he is using them to do things that nobody has ever done and score more efficiently and easily than anyone ever has. We can throw the Wilt caveat in there if you want — Chamberlain’s numbers are incomparable to anyone else — but what Steph is doing and what Steph can do on a basketball court has never been done before by anybody anywhere at anytime in history.

He is the best basketball player we’ve ever seen.

On top of the advantage he has of playing today in the most advanced era of basketball, he also has a mental edge that may be even more impressive.

Because while I have never seen anybody play better than Steph Curry, I have also never seen anyone play as confidently as Steph Curry. Michael Jordan was right there, no doubt. But it was different. His determination and will always seemed to be tied to proving something. He had to show the world that he was better.

Steph seems beyond that. In fact, “confident” may not even bet the right word here. “Certain” might be better. Steph doesn’t seem to have anything to prove. He believes he is the best deeply enough that it doesn’t matter who else does. It is a care-free, in the literal Webster’s definition of the term, way of playing that seems to leave him without the weight of pressure.

While his best-ever skill set isn’t going anywhere, it is hard to believe that certainty will be sustainable. Expectations and success build upon themselves, and it would be hard for any mortal to maintain such a mentality indefinitely.

Mike’s outlook was easier. He had a psychological makeup that led him to concoct slights in order to convince himself that he still had things to prove.

Steph’s current season seems to have a bit of that going on. After the first title and the MVP, there were comments, most notably from Clippers coach Doc Rivers, about the team getting lucky with injuries. The first-ever MVP award voted on by the players — a minor trophy that few even know exists — went to James Harden.

Stuff like this allowed the Warriors as a whole and Steph specifically to not let up one bit and instead ramp their play up to a historically unprecedented level. So there is a bit of “prove it” going on here. But more so it’s the carefree, cackling-while-he-does-it attitude of “yall seriously don’t know that I’m better than everyone else?”

Steph aint mad you doubted him. He just pitied your inability to see. And now that he has made sure the whole damn world is woke, it’s just about going out there and heaving up shots he knows that he — and only he in the history of the sport — can make.

Regardless of the why and how, that’s why Steph’s current otherworldliness may not be sustainable. And that’s where we get back to greatness. Who knows if Steph can maintain this for another five, six, or seven years? If he does, then we can go probably just go ahead and cancel basketball. There wouldn’t be much point in watching anyone else. Like trying to watch other boxers after Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, we would all just get really bored really quickly.

It seems more likely that he will not sustain this forever — mainly because imagining this continuing for another half decade boggles the mind beyond comprehension.

So we should just appreciated the best player ever now and recognize what we’re watching. Because it is both a testament to this young man’s talent and the evolution of the sport as a whole.

Though his scrawny, ordinary looking 6’3” frame belies any rational logic of him becoming the best, in one way it does make sense that Steph would be the one to break the sport.

Like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, Steph was born in the NBA, molded by it. He didn’t see how lesser men played basketball because he spent his childhood among the gods.

The best young Steph photo is one of him on his father Dell Curry’s lap during the 3-point contest at the 1992 All-Star weekend. He appears to be trying to give Mitch Richmond a high-five. Drazen Petrovic, one of the few people in the world who could (perhaps) shoot better than his dad, sat just a few feet away.

This was his life as a child. He was around NBA players all the time and spent hours and hours shooting near them on NBA courts. This was home.

Increasingly, the NBA is full of second-generation players. This goes back a long way. Danny Schayes was the son of Dolph, one of the league’s first superstars, and Hall of Famer Rick Barry spawned an army of kids who made the league. There is Kobe Bryant, Jalen Rose, Luke Walton, Damien Wilkins, Wally Szczerbiak, and Mike Dunleavy Jr.

This has always been a thing. But in today’s NBA, it now it feels like a flood.

Now it’s Steph and Klay Thompson and Andrew Wiggins, There is Jabari Parker, Justise Winslow. The slightly older guard has Al Horford, Kevin Love, Wesley Matthews, Gerald Henderson Jr, and Ronnie Brewer. Then we’ve got Devin Booker, Jae Crowder, Ed Davis, Tim Hardaway Jr, Glenn Robinson III, Larry Nance Jr., Phil Pressey, Austin Daye, and Joe Young.

This is no longer a few neat stories. It’s like 5% of the league.

Some of this is genetic, I’m sure. Another aspect has to be the opportunity and expectation. When you’re dad was so great and you are a little bit good when young, you’ll be put on all the right teams and coaches will instinctively want to give you the ball. (What up, Austin Rivers.)

But there is no doubt that osmosis plays a big factor. Kids soak up everything. Steph and the new crop of second-generation players did that when they were young. Steph saw things that Drazen and Muggsy Bogues and Larry Johnson did and mimicked them. He wasn’t copying some local star down the block who might have made a high school all-star team. He was learning from All-Stars. When he was 8 years old.

Steph is the evolution of basketball. He is the whole history of the sport personified in one goofy, 6’3” body. We complicate this sport a lot with analysis. But it comes down to who can put the ball in the hoop.

Steph Curry is the best there has ever been at putting an round orange ball through a cylinder. And it is because he has watched and learned from everyone who has come before him — then done what they did better.

Words With Friends

This week’s five must-read articles about the NBA. Excerpts here — click through to read the full piece.

1. What’s eating Draymond Green … or is there anything?
by Matt Steinmetz, MatthewSteinmetz.com

While Green has still been rebounding and assisting at very good rates, he’s just 4-for-his-last 24 from 3-point range and he’s put up some alarming turnover numbers. In the past 10 games, Green has had a 9-turnover game, two 7-turnover games and two 5-turnover games. That’s some of why things don’t feel all the way copacetic with Green. Here are some hunches – nothing more – of what might be going on.

2. The extraordinary measures of Giannis Antetokounmpo
by Kevin Arnovitz, ESPN

Basketball is a game of angles; a defender isn’t so much guarding his man as he is reducing the size of his angle to drive to the basket or pass to teammates. That’s where wingspan factors in for Antetokounmpo, whose outstretched arms measure 7-foot-3, 4 inches more than his height. “If you have long arms, it allows you to get places faster, without having to move your feet or your center of mass,” Elliott says. Antetokounmpo ranks in the top 10 in rebound rate among small forwards.

3. Overachievement woven into the Grizzlies’ fabric
by Rob Mahoney, Sports Illustrated

For four straight seasons the Grizzlies have outperformed their expected record (based on actual performance, not preseason expectation) by two games or more. As of today, they’re currently seven wins ahead of the 31–32 mark their overall play would suggest, according to pythagorean projections. Even the fully healthy Grizzlies bore the statistical markers of a .500 team. That they’ve clawed to 38 already makes them a virtual lock for the playoffs regardless of Gasol’s absence and their increasingly difficult schedule.

4. Justise Winslow is a rookie who plays with the savvy of a 10-year veteran
by Mike Prada, SB Nation

As Erik Spoelstra told Sports Illustrated, Winslow has the “emotional stability” to thrive. Right now, that’s more important than having the jump shot and, if you look closely, just as demonstrable a skill. Winslow’s willingness and ability to succeed at non-glamorous tasks are an impressive combination most 19-year-olds simply don’t possess. Better yet, they’re turning Winslow into a star. Individual defense has been Winslow’s hallmark from the jump and it didn’t take long for the league to notice. Winslow accepted the DeMar DeRozan assignment in his seventh pro game and thoroughly smothered him, forcing half a dozen errant shots and turnovers in a decisive second-half run.

5. The Wizards are the Marco Rubio of the NBA
by Dan Steinberg, Washington Post

Think about the things we’ve all thought about the Wizards. Everyone was convinced a few months ago that they’d be a winning team, a real contender, a breakout attraction. Even now, they feel like they should be a winning team. Despite one disappointment after another, the calendar is set up perfectly for them still to become a winning team. The competition never looks particularly overwhelming, and there’s no easy-to-explain reason they haven’t become a winning team. They have a fresh and modern slogan that fresh and modern analysts love; tell me “Pace and Space” doesn’t have a little “New American Century” to it.

What to Watch

The San Antonio Spurs stumbled on Monday in a loss to the Indiana Pacers. This ended their ability to control their own destiny in terms of seeding in the Western Conference playoffs.

In practical terms, with the Warriors on pace to break the all-time wins record, this was always the case. But San Antonio still, somehow, will play Golden State three more times in the regular season. So sweeping that could have gotten them a #1 seed and home-court advantage throughout the playoffs.

Instead, they will have to settle for the #2 seed despite likely finishing with 65+ wins and perhaps even hitting 70.

They do have the edge on Golden State in one regard, however. Their 30-0 home record, due to the set up of the schedule, is technically better than the Warriors’ 28-0 home record. Golden State made headlines recently for winning an all-time record 45th straight regular season game at home, but that spans two years.

So the Spurs can still make history if they go 41-0 at home. The current best-ever mark is held by the 1985-86 Boston Celtics at 40-1, and with 11 games left, there is still plenty of room to drop a game. Tonight, they face a largely dehorned Bulls team that is riddled by injury and has gone 5-5 in their last 10.

So the Spurs will likely continue on their quest for history.

Unfortunately, even if they do make history, there is no guarantee that Golden State won’t match that. And the Warriors, which come to San Antonio two more times this season, will happily play spoiler to San Antonio’s chase.

In all regards, the current Spurs are one of the best regular season teams ever even as they continue to be overshadowed by Steph and his friends from Northern California. So it will actually be fitting if San Antonio wins tonight at home, beats everyone else except for the Warriors one time, and finishes with a record-tying 40-1 home record.

Only to watch Golden State go 41-0 in Oakland.