The thing about basketball is that it absolutely rules. Yes, they do play defense still, and yes, they are actually trying very hard. Yes, there are a lot of 3-pointers in today’s game, and yes, that is okay. No, not every team plays the same way, and yes, you’re kind of a bad wrong idiot if you think they do.
I am a bad wrong idiot in a different way. The way basketball is designed stopped making obvious sense to me around the time LeBron went to Miami. Back then, it wasn’t “jump shots are ruining basketball;” it was “jump shots can’t win you a championship.”
Then jump-shooting teams won a bunch of championships.
A decade and a half later, similar 1990s apologist half-truths have gone from broadcasted dogma to whiny talking points for people realizing that the mindsets that defined their game and outlook no longer apply in any functional, let alone interesting, way. They have been left behind.
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Steph Curry's 3-point shooting is unprecedented and unduplicated
Steph Curry now has 4,000 made 3-pointers in his regular season career. This is over the course of 15 seasons. Stephen Curry has declared he would like to play past his current contract, per James Herbert of CBS Sports.
His current contract is expiring at the end of the 2026-27 season. That’s the rest of this season and two more. Starting in 2015-16 (absent his injured season), he’s never averaged fewer than four 3-pointers per game.
So, let's say Stephen Curry gets about four 3-pointers per game for the rest of his career. That would mean he would have to play 250-ish more games to hit 5k 3-pointers. He’s averaging a little over 60 games played per season right now. So that’s just about four more years of play at this level. 5k is absolutely doable.
On the other hand, the closest active player to 4,000 3-pointers is James Harden at 3,127. (The next closest is Damian Lillard, with multiple hundreds further behind.) This is the first season since 2019-20 that he’s actually making three 3-pointers a game. He’s also at around 60 games per season of late. Assuming he maintains that pace to the extent Curry would, Harden is looking at 297 more games from here.
Five-ish seasons for Harden, four-ish seasons for Curry. It depends on age-related decline and desire to keep playing, but Curry (as proven by this simple math drawn on a chalkboard in crayon) is more likely to cross his line first. That’s science, baby.
And if you’re including playoff 3-pointers, the numbers are even more starkly in Curry’s favor. We don’t need to get into that now. Who cares about the playoffs, right? Rings are fine, but a Basketball-Reference search is so much cooler.