Not since Tim Duncan has there been a more appropriate basketball name than Steph Curry. Why? S. Curry scurries.
It honestly sometimes seems like he has a special relationship with the ground, more like a water skeeter effortlessly moving its legs at hyperspeed to stay atop the surface of a pond than a human on a basketball court. He quickly, constantly, and cleverly moves throughout whole possessions, bending the defense until he gets a good shot or someone on his team does. He’s not just the league’s leading practitioner of off-the-ball ballet, he’s transcendent at the craft.
Curry played just his fifth NBA game of the season on Thursday and the first since October, when he broke his left hand in a collision with Phoenix center Aron Baynes. His return was a 23-point, seven-assist, seven-rebound performance while limited to 27 minutes, that left hand magical with several exceptional passes. It wasn’t enough, as the Warriors lost to the Toronto Raptors for the first time since the NBA Finals.
But much more has changed around Curry. Last season, he was surrounded by Klay Thompson (ACL tear), Kevin Durant (left for Brooklyn, Achilles tear), Draymond Green (knee sprain), and DeMarcus Cousins (left for L.A., ACL tear). This season, he’s found himself playing next to Damion Lee (his literal brother-in-law), Juan Toscano-Anderson (owner of one of the NBA’s best Twitter handles, @juanonjuan10), Dragan Bender (one of the NBA’s best names as well, but also a No. 4 draft pick who was so bad he now is on just a 10-day contract with the Warriors), and Mychal Mulder (no relation to X-Files). It is quite the downgrade in talent.
With Golden State’s abrupt fall from first to worst — they’re now owners of a 14-49 record — comes all sorts of asset-management in-speak as to what they should do from here forward. They will not make the playoffs. Many believe the Warriors shouldn’t play Curry for the rest of the season to ensure the best odds of the best draft pick, which should in turn have a reasonable chance to provide them quality production on the court, perhaps even dozens of marginal wins for the four seasons to come while they pay the relatively minuscule total prescribed by the rookie scale as agreed upon in the NBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement.
But if you go back and read that last sentence, you’ll see that it sucks. I fully recognize that I am one of the leading purveyors of this kind of content — an ability to look at basketball from an analytical point of view has been essentially responsible for my entire career. And yet that paradigm is also very divorced from what makes watching the game of basketball itself fun: the artistry, the skill, the competition. The talents that make successful coaches and general managers are very different than those that connect people with the game in the first place.
There’s a hierarchy of goals to consider here. For the 500-odd players, the 200-odd coaches, and the innumerable front office staff in the NBA, the major goal is winning the competition. Every day, every one of those people is thinking “How can I get myself or my team to become better to help us win a title?” For some, that’s improvement on the court, for others, it’s managing the pieces of the franchise in the best way to lead to success. For all, it’s an all-consuming passion.
That makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. This competition was created for the purpose of entertainment: the NBA exists not to name a champion but to entertain in the course of doing so. It is, after all, a game. If Curry creates joy (as the San Francisco Chronicle wrote), marvel (as Richard Jefferson noted), and fun (as teammate Andrew Wiggins said postgame), then, by golly, if he can play, he should play. To his immense credit, he is.
Over the years, there have been countless stars who have sat as their team’s seasons sunk. Meanwhile, Curry is back to scurry on the surface — overruling cynicism, bringing delight.
