5 most amazing one-man March Madness machines

1. Stephen Curry – 2008 Davidson Wildcats

Lost in Elite Eight — 32.0 points, 3.3 rebounds, 3.5 assists, 3.3 steals per game (4 games)

Before the titles, before the MVPs, before the ankle injuries and the 3-1 leads, Steph Curry was THE One-Man March Madness Band. Taking the reigns at Davidson, a small SoCon school in North Carolina, Curry guided them to a shocking Elite 8 run in the 2008 Tournament, taking down fellow mid-major upstart Gonzaga, Roy Hibbert’s Georgetown, and a Wisconsin team that at that point hadn’t lost in nearly six weeks before giving eventual champs Kansas a tight 59-57 game. Davidson did this with the highest non-Curry scoring output being 20 points from Jason Richards against Georgetown. No one else hit more than 15 points in any other part of the run.

Most of the country knew about Curry because of his gaudy shooting and his 30-point coming-out party against Maryland in the 2007 Tournament. But like Kemba, Curry was the main story of the 2008 Tournament. Yeah, Derrick Rose and Michael Beasley were more highly touted as the one-and-done phenoms, and the title game got a lot of attention. But a lot of the talk for the tournament centered around Curry, and how far he could take the Wildcats. Unlike Walker’s season, this wasn’t a down year for the tournament — Davidson’s opponents combined to lose 19 total games heading into March that year. Curry upended three of them, and came within two points of doing it to a fourth, with the typical roster of an NCAA Tournament team from the SoCon flanking him.

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There’s no better example of the one-man machine than Curry — a player who is a singular force, capable of destroying the hopes of more complete and talented teams, simply by being unguardable for a four-to-six game stretch when it matters most. Few have accomplished that feat, and none have done it quite to the degree that the future best NBA Shooter Alive managed as a sophomore in 2008. Ten years after Curry’s magical run, we’re hoping for the same from Trae Young – but Curry set an almost impossible precendent, the likes of which we probably won’t ever see again.