On Thursday night, Stephen Curry scored 56 points in the Warriors’ win over the Orlando Magic. He hit 12 three-pointers.
The fact that such a sentence is, frankly, not that unusual, is the remarkable thing here. It was Curry’s 14th 50-point game, the same amount as Lebron James. It was the third time he has hit at least 12 threes, matching his ex-teammate Klay Thompson for that rather specific record; he has hit double-digit threes a total of 26 times now.
Okay, yes, fine, the “greatest shooter ever” thing has been around for a decade at this point — but the absolutely wild thing is that even now, in his 16th NBA season and with 1,006 games under his belt, as he turns 37 just two weeks from now, Curry is extending his shooting records rather than starting to come down to earth.
After the win over the Magic, he has made 3,969 three-pointers. (Side note: he could feasibly hit number 4,000 on his birthday — if he had a game that night instead of one the night before and one the night after. Why does the league hate fun? They also failed to schedule a Lakers game for Lebron’s 40th birthday earlier this season. C’mon.) That’s 868 ahead of second place, where James Harden now sits; that’s about the distance between Harden and 12th place. Other active players are in fourth (Damian Lillard), fifth (Klay Thompson), and seventh (Lebron).
All of these players are, of course, old by NBA standards — that’s how you end up toward the top of counting stats lists like this, by playing for decades. But Steph hasn’t really slowed down: he is also leading the entire NBA this year in made threes per game, at 4.4 — that means he is widening the gap between him and those active players chasing his record, by 0.9 threes every game for Lillard, by 1.3 per game for Klay, by 1.5 per game for Harden, and so on.
And of course he’s also extending the lead on younger players who came into a league already fundamentally changed by Steph’s shooting. None of those younger shooters — Anthony Edwards, Donovan Mitchell, Jayson Tatum, or anyone else — has a career threes-per-game rate even in the general ballpark of Curry’s. Whenever he decides to retire, he will leave behind a three-point mountain that, even with that changed game, certainly seems impossible to climb right now.
This has been the latest edition of NBA Old Guy Appreciation.
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