Has Steph Curry supplanted LeBron as the 'Best Player in the World?' (CP Alert)
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The best player in the league? Not too sure its just hard to give PGs that best title. If you put Curry on the sixers for 20 games and then put Lebron on the sixers for 20 games, which team would have the better out put?
I think Curry is the most dangerous player in the league because hes hell to guard. Simple because of his deep 3pt shot off the dribble and plus if you crowd him, his teammates are not too bad either so you have to respect them, which opens up his offensive game.
But i got mad respect for the dude. Especially seeing how he developed from a small scrawny kid jack up shots on the aau circuit to being one of the best in the league.
I think Curry is the most dangerous player in the league because hes hell to guard. Simple because of his deep 3pt shot off the dribble and plus if you crowd him, his teammates are not too bad either so you have to respect them, which opens up his offensive game.
But i got mad respect for the dude. Especially seeing how he developed from a small scrawny kid jack up shots on the aau circuit to being one of the best in the league.
Yessir!!! Motherfuckers got a LOT better, and Paul George is killing the league right now so him vs LeBron is a stand off! With the Cavs injury history, and the way the east has improved, no way LeBron is going to be able to put them on his back and roll to the finals like he did last year.
People forget also, LeBron might be 30, but in terms of BB Years, he's closer to 35, Dude has been around a LONG time and has played a LOT of minutes in his career! Shits gonna catch up with him sooner or later, especially if he has to keep carrying a broken down team come February...
You should have seen Kimba Walkers reaction when he couldn't get around a screen to contest Curry's shot.. That shit sums it up... As a team you can be playing your best and this nigga just lighting shit up shooting bad shots that always going in
This season... I would say they would be better with Curry! He's more dynamic in the areas we need! LeBron is still by nature a deferring type player, and put Curry on a team with a dominant inside presence like Okafor, and it's lights out!
IMO he has to do this shit for more than 20 games to get the 'title', but if he keeps this shit up all year, and leads them to a Chip, its a no brainer.
With him, right now, they are pretty much unbeatable in a 7 game series, take him off that team, you have the Raptors or Bulls, a good team, but not a great one. Shit, put his key players on teams without him, and they become good to average.
If you never seen Curry play, get the fuck out this thread. You have nothing to add here.
Ive repeatedly called Wilt Chamberlain the GOAT and best to ever do it, try again.
Come to NC so we can get you to a Hornets game and you can tell Daddy Jordan face to face bout all them years in the 80s when Detroit was making mince meat of him 3 years straight you was the only NY dude repping strong and bragging bout his day would come someday. Or how gangster it was for him to get the league to create "flagrant fouls". And how you still got that authentic double A Birmingham Barons jersey framed. Or how when he retired Kobe became your new fave since his game reminded you so much of him on some Mary J Blige shit, "YOU KNOW THAT YOU REMIND ME!!! OF A GUARD THAT I ONCE KNEW...YES ITS TRUE!". I really do wish you MJ Riders could meet the cat just to see if he's everything you dream of him to be. LOL.
He is a special player, but I don't think it's a gamer changer though. I say that because he is such a rarity. It's pure skill and that is something that is a lost art in the league. Nba will always have great shooters, but to do it like the way he is doing, I'm not sure we will see this again anytime soon. Shit, we will likely never see this type of efficiency ever again with such high volumes of shots. Like, we'll never see Wilt Chamberlin numbers ever again. But game changer, I don't know. Ninja don't work on their game like that anymore. For example, Derrick Rose.
Lmaooo.
The thing that tripped me out about that play was that Bogut took off running down the court immediately after he passed the ball.
All them mofos do that when he shoots Lmaoo
Gotta give props to Dell Curry he said he didn't allow Steph to play AAU ball because you learn to much bad habits and no fundamentals
who said anything about rings? what are you even talking about? You are having a meltdown. Take your ass to Insidehoops and you can talk about Kobe all day over there.
This article is not about LeBron, but after reading it, it begs the question of who holds that title now. What Curry is doing has truly NEVER been seen before... Amazing Stat I heard, if he keeps up at this pace, he will have made more 3s this season and last combined, than Larry Bird made his entire career!! That shit is astounding!!
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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/stephen-curry-is-the-revolution/ Before this year’s NBA season started, I had a conversation with a Golden State Warriors fan. He was excited about his team and was keen to explainits success: It was perfectly balanced, with perfect chemistry, role players, coaching and management. That Stephen Curry is pretty amazing also helped. His point that the Warriors are some kind of Zen basketball masterpiece is hardly controversial. Yet a few minutes into our conversation I found myself arguing strenuously that this diehard Curry fan didn’t really understand how great — and how important — Curry is. Other than Daryl Morey, Curry is perhaps the figurehead in the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution™. It’s easy to get swept up in the narrative that 3-point shooting has been long-undervalued and that smart sharpshooters are finally taking over the NBA. Teams that shot the most and the best from beyond the arc last year dominated like never before. The correlation between a team’s rate of attempting threes and its winning percentage was the highest it has ever been (.47). In the playoffs, the top 3-point-shooting teams made up the entirety of the conference finals: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.w.../2015/12/morris-stephcurry-41.png?w=610&h=541
Leave aside the sharp drop on the right of the chart for a moment: Curry has hit 45 percent with a defender between 2 and 4 feet away, 44 percent with a defender between 4 and 6 feet away, and 47 percent with the closest defender more than 6 feet away. Yes, that’s right, Curry shoots threes about as well with a defender 2 to 4 feet away (classified as “tight” by NBA.com) as an average NBA shooter does with the nearest defender 12 feet away.
Sure, Curry has shot poorly when “smothered” with defenders less than 2 feet from him. This is perhaps unsurprising considering that Curry is only 6-foot-3, and this includes blocks by definition. But note that these types of shots are pretty rare: They accounted for only 25 shots in the data, about 3 percent of his 3-point attempts. In any case, Curry seems to be all right atgetting himself good looks:
http://espn.go.com/video/clip?id=espn:14239233
So aside from the rare smothering, Curry seems fairly immune to defense.6He hits about 42 percent of the hardest quartile(ish) of his shots (specifically, the 28 percent with the closest defender less than 4 feet away),7or about 126 points per 100 attempts. In other words, if Golden State could replace its entire offense with just the bottom quartile of Stephen Curry’s 3-point attempts — without him ever being fouled and with them never collecting an offensive rebound — they would have the best offense in NBA history by a wide margin.
But it gets crazier.
Another proxy for a shot being pressured is how much time is left on the shot clock. As the clock winds down, the expected value of a possession drops as well, since players may be compromising shot quality to get a shot off. With Curry, not so much:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/morris-stephcurry-53.png?w=610&h=541
Curry takes a huge portion of his shots early in the shot clock (more than 50 percent) and is deadly on these. His worst time frame is with around 12 to 16 seconds left — where he has still made 42 percent. Then, he somehow shoots better and better as the clock runs down! In addition to being another example of how the traditional ideas of “good” and “bad” shots don’t really apply to Curry, this also has the very practical implication that Curry’s teammates should be willing to pass up reasonably good shots even if it means Curry will have less time to set up his own.
Curry vs. the Warriors
Of course, the Warriors aren’t an average team. So perhaps it’s impractical to think that their great shooters should be passing up good looks. For this, let’s first look at how well and how often the entire Warriors squad shoots. I’ve plotted each Warrior’s true shooting percentage8 against his field-goal attempts per 36 minutes this season.
We normally expect a flat to negative relationship between these two variables: Players with a small burden are more selective and tend to be “sharpshooters” taking wide-open threes and such, while high-volume shooters have to do the dirty work of taking shots that aren’t open and aren’t easy but are better than nothing. Incidentally, this is one reason why some great players with heavy shooting burdens may appear less valuable than they are: If they’re forced to take all the bad shots, they could be doing better on those than average but still have low efficiency.
With Curry, we have no such problem:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/morris-stephcurry-6.png?w=610&h=583
Curry demolishes the trend by taking an absurd number of shots efficiently. Here’s Curry’s true shooting percentage over the past four years compared with that of the other Warriors:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/morris-stephcurry-7.png?w=610&h=527
This already has a big impact on the Warriors’ bottom line. But the huge gap between him and the rest of the club — his “perfectly balanced” supporting cast — again makes it likely that a subpar shot for him may be well above average for his team.
The Curry stratagem
One way to get Curry more shots is to have players pass up shots so that Curry can take them. But another angle is for the offense to set up and have Curry take certain shots as quickly as possible. A shot like the pull-up 3-point jumper, say.
The pull-up three is not normally a great shot in the NBA. The league on the whole converts about 28 percent on average (corresponding to 84 points per 100 possessions) — well below the 35 percent that players convert on all 3-pointers. But since the start of last season, Curry has converted 42 percent of his. Here’s a plot of every player with at least 100 pull-up 3-point attempts in the same period:
https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/morris-stephcurry-81.png?w=610&h=637
So say Curry was instructed to take significantly more pull-up 3-point attempts than the large number he already takes. Even assuming that these shots were a little bit worse than the ones the Warriors would be able to get otherwise (highly questionable), getting efficient shots off early in a possession has other ancillary benefits. For one, it allows the Warriors to pack more possessions into a game, which is good because they are gaining ground on their opponents for every possession exchanged (unless they play a better opponent, which these days they don’t). But second, being able to play a very fast-paced offense when necessary (such as Curry taking quick threes early in the clock) allows them to extend the game as much as possible when they’re behind, just as being able to play a slow-paced offense (such as holding the ball unless you have a clear shot and then letting Curry shoot under pressure) is valuable for shortening the game when they’re ahead.
In other words, building your offensive strategy around “Curry as options 1, 2, and 3” has win-maximizing benefits beyond Curry’s shooting efficiency.
No, seriously, Curry is getting better
Every article about every great young athlete ever seems to end with “And he’s just getting better and better” — even though this often isn’t true. So let me end this one with, “No, seriously, he really is getting better and better.”
And, other than the fact that Curry is so good right now that he can’t possibly get better, there’s no evidence of him slowing down. To illustrate, here’s every NBA season during Curry’s seven-year career:
Curry has taken on additional shot-making responsibilities throughout his career, yet his true shooting percentage has been getting better and BETTER.
As I mentioned earlier, for most players, this is a trade-off: The larger the burden placed on them, the less efficient they are. I’ve added a trend line through all of the players other than Curry9 to show how it’s normally flat. This is because better players tend to get more shots, which counteracts the fact that a given player taking more shots tends to be less efficient. I’ve also colored in LeBron James and Durant, so you can see that the standard relationship basically holds even for MVPs. But Curry has set career highs in both attempts and efficiency — in the same year — four times, including each of the past three seasons. That is, Curry comes only in shades of good, better and best (in that order). Curry is truly the Dennis Rodman of shooting!
Indeed, when considering Curry’s potential, I think Rodman is perhaps an even more important precedent than Chamberlain or Michael Jordan. Rodman came into the league as a reasonably well-rounded player but had an incredible talent for rebounding. As years went by, his teams leaned on this skill more and more. He took on fewer and fewer offensive responsibilities, and he started gathering larger and larger shares of his team’s rebounds. In the 1993-94 season, he gathered nearly 29.7 percent of all available rebounds — at the time, the highest by any other player was Moses Malone, with 23.4 percent in 1976-77. Despite being one of the most one-dimensional players ever, this made Rodman one of the most valuable players in NBA history.10
While exceeding 50 points per game sounds crazy — it would require Curry to take on the order of half of his team’s shots — as evidenced by Rodman, fully exploiting a game-breaking skill can lead to unthinkable results.
Do I really think that the Warriors will adopt an all-Curry-all-the-time strategy and knock Wilt out of the record books?
I don’t know. But Curry himself is a microcosm of the revolution that we’ve already seen. Just as the math suggests that good midrange jump shots should often be exchanged for worse 3-pointers if possible, so the math suggests that good non-Curry shots should be exchanged for worse Curry shots. I’m confident in saying that we aren’t there yet. And if that revolution happens as well, look out.
CORRECTION (Dec. 3, 11:30 a.m.): An earlier version of a chart in this story incorrectly gave the source of the data on shooting percentage by time remaining on the shot clock; it was Nylon Calculus, not Basketball-Reference.com.
CORRECTION (Dec. 3, 12:02 p.m.): An earlier version of this article misstated the rate of Curry’s 3-point attempts this year and last year. They were per 100 possessions, not per possession.
While its KNOW doubt his time right now.. I think he has to prove his championship was no fluke, its still early in the season,
and how he represents in the playoffs, will answer that question....
but again right now, no doubt its his time.....
aint that supposed to be mark jacksons team tho??
they did him dirty!!
He doesn't have an all around game though.....
Curry will go down as the most deadliest shooter of all-time at the pace he is going
. Curry is a unique talent. Lebron will be a top 10 all-time great so I ain't taking nothing from him.
. Curry is a unique talent. Lebron will be a top 10 all-time great so I ain't taking nothing from him.
no.
what's so sad was none of the shit u said was funny or true..i've been a bulls fan since 89 has never changed teams ever and still scream the bulls to this day..never owned a pair of jordans in my life..juss 1 pair of jordan brands(a pair of eddie jones), actually had several pair of pippens..once again u never said who was ur fave team b4 lebron entered the league..u been a fan of 2 diff teams in 6 yrs..u went from cabs to heat now back to the cavs..now the ultimate dickrider is a nig jumping on diff squads cause his crush went to diff teams..i bet if lebron leave to anothe team u gonna switch bball caps again and claim u love that team to..now how a nig from nc screaming cleveland or miami.. when jordan left the first time most jordan dickriders became magic fans, than they hopped back on the bulls, than when he left they started screaming lakers, than when lakers dynasty collapse, they became lebron fans..u see u seem to be that nig..i screamed bulls b4 their first ring and i'll scream bulls even after their 17 yr drought cause i'm a bulls fan not a jordan fan..so once again who was ur team b4 lebron entered the league???(i bet u gonna follow the pattern of what i said a jordan dickrider went)
You a "Bulls fan" but when cats on this board go in on D Rose or the current Bulls I never see you play "Captain Save Em" or get this defensive. Stop faking MJ rider. But the minute someone dont prop your daddy up its "LeBron this, LeBron that". Mofo MJ was already a Bull in 89 which is why yo ass became a fan. Have several seats. Ima talk to my partner at the Time Warner Arena, see if we can get your groupie ass some backstage passes to a Hornets game on some Make a Wish shit. Let you finally meet your daddy.
Man. I saw that shit.. and dude running up the court to play defense before Curry even squared up...lmbao
I was just getting ready to say this!! Glad you saved me the effort! Dudes acting like he's been doing this this season against my Sixers for 20 games and shit!
If he keeps shooting like this, it is though. His jumper is about to be like Kareem's skyhook or Jordan's fadeaway... you just hope he misses.. because he's too fast to press up on him and if you give him too much space, he'll pull from 5 feet behind the 3 point line off the dribble..
Don't know if he's the best player in the league but he is one of the leagues best offensive scorer no doubt.
When I think of best player I think of Lebron. Lebron has a good all around skillset on top of leadership.
Gotta ask what criteria is used to decide whats the best player?
It's definitely entertaining to watch Curry he is lighting up the league right now.
When I think of best player I think of Lebron. Lebron has a good all around skillset on top of leadership.
Gotta ask what criteria is used to decide whats the best player?
It's definitely entertaining to watch Curry he is lighting up the league right now.
Dude is dope.
LeBron is labeled this best cause he can play every 4 position the best in the NBA and the world. Curry can't play all four position the best. It's not just about Curry's stats in the NBA, LeBron is the best overall player globally in the world.
When was the last time Curry disappeared in Overtime and his team lost?
Nah man don't do that Bron out there carrying a bunch of bums.. He single handedly bring them back.. Those clowns ain't step up.. No surprise there
Lol!!! I feel you Dude.... Kevin Love out there thinking it's a scrimmage and shit!
Actually Game 2 of last season's Finals. Curry didn't do too much. But you're determined to crown him.
Since when was asking if you mad "getting old"? Is drinking water corny as fuck? You in here having a tantrum. So yeah you mad.
First of all... I was joking...
Second of all, change your tampon because obviously your period just came on!! Calm the fuck down!! FOH...
Wow. And sure. Wow.
Exactly what I was saying. Curry has an exceptional team. Though he's a exceptional scorer. Cavs meet them in the finals we will see
I'm thinking Westbrook is a better player now. He showed his potential when Durant went down last year.
I still think Lebron is the best player currently. Curry the most dominant right now tho. And clearly on the best team.
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