Is a Stephen Curry explosion building?
By Ian Levy
Stephen Curry was a volcano this season. His production was massive, imposing, and every few games he would erupt with fire and fury, laying waste to anything in proximity and reshaping the very landscape around him.
That is not the Stephen Curry we’ve seen in the NBA Finals. As Neil Paine pointed out at FiveThirtyEight yesterday, Curry averaged more than 30 points per game in the regular season and has totaled just 48 through the first three games against the Cleveland Cavaliers. By Paine’s analysis, Curry has had the worst three-game start to an NBA Finals by a regular season MVP going back to 1984, and by an enormous margin.
The fundamental nature of Curry’s production during the regular season was greatness punctuated by frequent outbursts of incomprehensibility. Curry was the league leader in Kevin Ferrigan’s average DRE (a single game, box score based estimate of a player’s net impact per 100 possessions), finishing at +9.1. The next closest player was Chris Paul at +5.9.
If we look at the game-by-game progression of Curry’s DRE we can see those incredible heights, the single game eruptions.
Curry has 26 games this season with a DRE above +12.0 — a mark of +12.0 is about twice Chris Paul’s per game average, about three times Anthony Davis’. As an example of what a +12.0 type performance looks like in box score terms — Curry had a DRE of +12.2 on March 23 against the Los Angeles Clippers, with 33 points, 4 rebounds, 5 assists, 3 steals, and just one turnover, shooting 12-of-23 from the field.
Given his regular season sample, we’d expect Curry to explode for a +12.0 DRE performance in about one out of every three games. The distribution was not quite that regular during the season, but the longest he went between +12.0 performances was 15 games (two of which he sat out because of injury) from December into early January. He is yet to hit that mark even once in the playoffs to this point. The last time Curry hit +12.0 or higher in a game was the last day of the regular season against the Memphis Grizzlies. He’s played exactly 14 games since then.
It is not as simple as saying that Curry is “due” for a monster game. The knee injury he suffered in the first round against the Houston Rockets may be lingering; although he hasn’t acknowledged it as a factor, Curry doesn’t look quite as explosive. He also was matched up for seven games with the Oklahoma City Thunder, who put together a masterful defensive performance and threw up as many physical barriers to his greatness as anyone else has been able to manage this season.
It is not that weird to see Curry struggle — he did have eight games this season with a negative DRE. We do understand that he is a human being, an athlete not an actual volcano. It is the duration of the struggle that is jarring. Still, one can’t help but feel that somewhere deep below the surface, in some subterranean chamber that we can’t see or measure, the pressure is building towards a massive release.