Regardless of your view on the all-time rankings, this much is indisputable: Curry is the prime mover, the stylistic and cultural centerpiece, of a franchise that has now won four NBA championships in eight years. He’s the reason—the rising tide that lifts all boats, the warming sun that allows new possibilities to grow, the once-in-a-lifetime comet who illuminates everything else as he streaks across the sky.
Without Steph, the Warriors basically couldn’t score against the Celtics’ smothering defense in these Finals. During Curry’s brief breathers at the start of the second and fourth quarters—stretches when Kerr hoped that Thompson, Poole, Green, and whoever else he had in the cupboard could scrounge together a few minutes’ worth of buckets—the Dubs’ offense coughed and sputtered to the tune of a desolate 88.6 points per 100 possessions, miles below what the league’s worst offenses generate.
What Kerr’s adjustment lacked in complexity, it made up for with consequence: Curry just left the court less—after averaging only 33.6 minutes per game through the first three rounds of the postseason, he logged 38.7 over the final four games of the Finals—and did even more.
When hoop fan conversation turns to GOATs, lists, and faces on mountains, Steph sometimes catches slings and arrows because his primary mode of influence—stretching defenses until they snap—appears less forceful and injurious to the opposition than the more physically brutalizing styles of some other, larger immortal contemporaries. Lest we damn him with faint praise about changing the game by warping geometry, though, let’s be clear: What Curry did to the Celtics was dominance. He scored or assisted on 43.2 points per game against the no. 1 defense in the NBA, while guarded primarily by the just-crowned Defensive Player of the Year in Marcus Smart, with near-constant extra help … and that number doesn’t account for the hockey assists, or all the baskets he sets up by demanding defensive attention everywhere he goes.
After establishing themselves as the premiere switching defense in the NBA this season, the Celtics came out in drop coverage early in the Finals, willing to live with some lightly contested 30-foot Steph pull-ups if it meant keeping the ball out of the paint and preventing Green from getting untracked as a playmaker in the half court; Steph responded by drilling 25 of 51 3s in games 1 through 4. When they did try to switch, he hunted Boston’s bigs, torching Al Horford and a hobbled Robert Williams III off the bounce to get all the way to the rim. When they tried to crank up the pressure, he just drew out the help and got off the ball, dumping it to his outlets and letting them attack four-on-three in more space; it’s not a coincidence that Wiggins, Thompson, Poole, Payton, and Green all started making larger and larger offensive contributions as the series wore on.
Curry’s most notable buckets come from far away, but the act of defending those shots—actually getting out far enough to contest them well—is hard. So is dealing with the every-possession marathon that precedes them, and the slicing drives to the rim that come when you overextend to try to take the long ball away. It’s mentally and physically exhausting, and that’s what so often gets missed about Steph’s game: It’s not just flair and style; it’s every bit as ferocious, staggering, and physically demanding as the battering-ram routines of Giannis and LeBron. Dominance arrived at through different means is no less dominant; just ask the Celtics how it felt to deal with him for two weeks.
It might be a bridge too far to say that Curry broke Boston’s defense; the Celtics conceded 110 points per 100 possessions for the series, according to NBA Advanced Stats, a mark that would’ve tied for 10th during the regular season. Stripping out those scuffling early-second-and-fourth lineups, though, and just focusing on Steph’s minutes tells a different tale: With Curry on the floor, Golden State averaged 115.8 points-per-100—just below the league-leading regular-season mark.
“You talk about his size—you’ve never seen a guy his size dominate the league like this and just to put the weight of everything on his shoulders throughout a Finals series,” Iguodala said. “You know, like … we all saw what he was doing to them boys.”
By the end of the series, all Boston really had left was trying to bully him—putting him in action, having Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown target him in isolation, deputizing Horford and Smart to post him up—to try to tire him out and beat him up. Curry, a veteran of playing the Most Dangerous Game with LeBron James and James Harden, just shrugged it off, banging right back whenever they went at him, without wavering, faltering, or blinking; the Celtics scored a measly 0.79 points per chance on possessions when they attacked Curry in isolation, according to Second Spectrum’s tracking. He held up, nary a scratch on him, and delivered plenty of pounding of his own on the other end in a performance that will put him into even more rarefied air.
Curry’s now one of only six players ever to win four championships, multiple league MVPs, and a Finals MVP, joining Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Tim Duncan, and LeBron. He’s one of just four players ever to average at least 30 points, five rebounds, and five assists per game in two separate Finals, joining Jordan, LeBron, and Jerry West. Only Jordan has averaged more points in title-clinching contests. The last remaining arguments against him have all but fallen away; as the man himself asked aloud in the visiting locker room after the game, “What are they gonna say now?”
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