Stephen Curry enters the Golden State Warriors’ nationally televised Thursday matchup with the Sacramento Kings just two shots away from yet another piece of long-distance history.
After going 5-for-11 from deep in Golden State’s 130-120 win over the Portland Trail Blazers on Monday, Curry sits at 3,998 made 3-pointers for his illustrious career. Two more, and he becomes the first player ever to make 4,000 3-pointers. (In the regular season, anyway. Factor in playoff performance, and Steph’s already within striking distance of 5,000.)
“It’s crazy — crazy,” Warriors head coach Steve Kerr told reporters after a recent win over the Pistons during which Curry became the 30th player in NBA/ABA history to reach 25,000 career points. “It feels like 25,000 3s, actually.”
Chances are it won’t take Curry too long to get those two triples.
Curry averages 4.5 made 3-pointers per game, leading the league for the fifth straight season (and the 12th time in the last 13 years). He has made two or more 3s in 52 of his 56 games this season — including 17 straight contests, the NBA’s longest active streak. He’s hit two before halftime 34 times this season; he’s knocked in a pair in the first quarter 15 times.
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Combine that with the fact that Curry will be facing a Sacramento defense that’s given up more triples per game this season than anybody but the woeful Jazz and Pelicans — and that, on Monday, allowed a Knicks team missing superstar point guard Jalen Brunson to drain a season-high-tying 22 long balls — and the conditions seem favorable for an early celebration of the latest in a long line of beyond-the-arc milestones on the résumé of the greatest shooter the game’s ever seen.
In 2013, Curry set a record for most 3-pointers in a single season, surpassing Ray Allen’s previous mark of 269:
Two years later, en route to his first NBA Most Valuable Player award, he surpassed himself, re-setting the bar at 286 long balls:
One year after that, in what would become the first unanimous MVP campaign in NBA history, Steph sent the bar into orbit, turning in the first 300- and 400-triple season:
And ever since … well, ladies and gentlemen, he’s been floating in space.
There have been 104 10-3-pointer games in NBA history; Curry has 26 of them. There have been seven 300-3-pointer seasons in NBA history; Curry has five of them.
In 2021, after leapfrogging Allen for the all-time 3-point record, Curry broke the 3,000-triple barrier. It took nearly three years for James Harden to turn that into a two-person club … and now, Steph’s just two flicks of the wrist away from leaving everyone in the dust yet again.
“I feel like I’m living a constant-dream kind of vibe,” Curry told reporters after the Warriors beat the Knicks at Madison Square Garden last week. “Because from when 2,974 [his all-time record-setting 3-pointer] happened here three years ago, that was never — I mean, [4,000] was a goal, but it was never … I never thought it’d be a reality.”
Curry arrives at the doorstep of that mind-boggling achievement thanks in part to another bit of seeming unreality: that, on the eve of his 37th birthday on Friday, he’s still one of the most devastatingly efficient and effective offensive players on the planet — and one who’s been unleashed by the arrival of Jimmy Butler.
The Jimmy Butler effect
Since Butler’s debut with the Warriors on Feb. 8, Curry is averaging 29.9 points (second only to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander in that span) and 6.1 assists per game, shooting 49.6% from the field, 42.4% from 3-point land on 12.3 launches a night and 92.3% from the free-throw line — good for a ludicrous .689 true shooting percentage. The last player to even sniff that combination of scoring volume and shooting efficiency over the course of a full season (minimum 50 games played)? Well, that would be … Stephen Curry, back in 2017-18, when he and Kevin Durant were reducing the basketball world to cinders.
The presence of another bona fide All-Star offensive threat for defenses to honor has helped open up things for Curry. He’s taking a higher share of his shots at the rim than he was before the Butler deal and finishing them at a 70% clip, which would be the second-highest rate of his career. And with Butler spearheading the Warriors’ transformation into one of the league’s top free-throw-generating teams — Golden State has spent 26.5% of its offensive possessions in the bonus since Jimmy’s arrival, according to PBP Stats, the third-highest rate in the NBA, up from 20.3% previously, the league’s third-lowest rate — Curry’s been taking 6.5 freebies per game, nearly double his nightly take prior to the trade.
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It’s all added up to the kind of heater that few players in the league can match. Curry averaged more than a point per minute during Golden State’s recent road trip, with 32 triples in five games, bookended by his 56-point explosion in Orlando and 40-point performance in Brooklyn; in both games, he heard MVP chants despite being a visitor.
It’s exceedingly unlikely that he’ll be able to join Gilgeous-Alexander, Nikola Jokić and Giannis Antetokounmpo in the upper echelons of the MVP conversation this season. It’s worth noting, though, that Curry does rank in or near the top 10 this season in estimated plus-minus, value over replacement player, box plus-minus and Kostya Medvedovsky’s DARKO daily plus-minus metrics — a reminder of just how potent a weapon he remains, and precisely the justification for Golden State’s big deadline-day swing for Butler to augment the team around Curry.
Sixteen years and about-to-be-4,000 3-pointers after his NBA journey began, Stephen Curry is still the guy you go all-in for — a once-in-a-lifetime megawatt attraction that’s always worth the cost of doing business and the price of admission.
“When we were out there on the court, I was thinking to myself, ‘The NBA is lucky,’” longtime running buddy Draymond Green recently said. “This guy is going into every arena and putting on a show. We’re all lucky.”
