SEEING STEPHEN CURRY
I traveled to the Bay Area for many things; one of them was to watch Stephen Curry play, finally, after all these years.
Many of the complaints lodged against Wardell Stephen Curry II — that he was a nepo baby, that the Warriors had an unfair amount of talent around him, that the NBA became tailor made for his skill set — are no longer being said. The NBA has come a long way in a short time from the Light Years Warriors era, where every team was lining up just to play against them in the Western Conference Finals or the NBA Finals. Kevin Durant is no longer a teammate of Steph’s; Draymond Green upgraded from harmless dick punching to indefinite suspensions to get his “mental health” in order; Klay Thompson spends his time being as ineffective as Andrew Wiggins is now. When Tommy Shelby, the protagonist of the Netflix show Peaky Blinders, met with a former war buddy who was incarcerated, one by one he told his buddy about the fates of the men he served with. It’s ugly; a lot of the people who served with him are shells of the men they used to be. “John is gone, Arthur is sick, Jeremiah preaches the gospel barefoot.” That’s Curry and the Warriors now; all the glory days — beating teams by 20 after Curry hit three straight threes that broke the opposition’s back — are fleeting.
I am honored to be in the Bay Area: a little bit for work, but I am here to have some fun too. You can’t keep a good man down; you can’t keep him from wanting to watch his favorite players play in different cities. Seeing Curry play was a bucket list wish of mine, along with the Knicks winning a NBA title, going to New Orelans or going to Magic City in Atlanta. It’s the eighth wonder of the world: he’s someone who makes the game look demonstratively easy when it is the hardest league to be elite in, mathematically and skillset wise. Everyone on the planet plays basketball. It's a fairly simple game. Only 450 players get to be in the Association though. Curry has made it in the No Boys Allowed league, by playing bigger than his height. It wasn’t only his otherworldly shooting, but rather the way he warms up before a game. Instead of doing the regular work, you often see him move around before taking a shot so he is in the moment that he’ll get a chance to be in during the games. Not only his off the dribble shooting, but also his shiftiness. It’s also in the fact that he will almost surely spend his entire career playing for the Golden State Warriors, and everyone, besides someone who betted on Curry in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals, will have mostly fond memories about it. He is this generation’s Tim Duncan: a selfless teammate that has become synonymous with the disicipline of winning and being consistently elite while doing so. In just a decade, he went from being a fun little player that fans liked watching to a national hero that has E-40 on speed dial. He’s someone who kids will end up emulating; old men scratched their heads wondering whether he was ruining the game that conveniently passed them.
If I may go back to the time where Curry wasn’t universally beloved, I’ll begin to be able to explain why that was, and what makes his career so interesting to me now, more than what it was before. I don’t necessarily think that Curry has ever been hated; he’s far too diplomatic and undeniably electric to hate on. I do think that some subset of NBA fans felt that he was a little bit too clean; too pretty for their taste. In fairness to him, LeBron is too. This is someone who has become a stand-in for all the positives of Black fatherhood and Black love, with his seemingly seamless marriage to Savannah James. But, Bron, a six foot nine Black man with tattoos, will always make people uncomfortable because of sheer appearance. If LeBron is beloved, it is because he has had to be in complete control of himself at all times. He’s essentially Obama: a generational talent and figure that masks the problem the NBA has had with race since the beginning of time, and the problem it will continue to have once LeBron leaves. (It’s already having it. People just don’t like the fact that this league is overwhelmingly Black. It needs to be so much better than the other leagues, and right now, it isn’t). It is why I try not to fault him for being the most uncool person on earth: it’s probably better that LeBron doesn’t carry himself with the edginess of Jordan or even, Kobe and Iverson. If LeBron wasn’t famous, he’d be the third coolest man in an all-Black law firm; he’d probably marry Molly from Insecure. LeBron has no time for complicated controversies like comitting sexual assault in a Colorado hotel room, or gambling with convicted drug dealers. With him being from the inner city and coming out of high school, people would have fried him publicly if made any semblance of a mistake. “Streets is Watching” was about Jay-Z; but it should be adopted by LeBron as his own personal mantra.
In many ways, Kobe Bryant should have been more liked than he was during his playing career. Kobe, in many respects, felt like a man without a country. Black people thought he was a tad bit too weird, and suburban; white people liked him but he came out of high school (racists always want black athletes to have done at least two years of college) and he wasn’t Jordan. (It’s complicated. Kobe used to rap in the hoods of Philadelphia while visiting his grandmother. It reminds me of my life. I may have lived on Riverside Drive but I had plenty of Uptown nights where I spent more time illing, and less time chilling). When Iverson came around at the same time as Kobe, it was harder for Bryant to get out of Iverson's shadow. Iverson, after all, was a ghetto child at a time when hip-hop was at its zenith. There’ll be nothing like Iverson ever again; the unapologetically tatted maestro with an “all or nothing” party mentality. He is our 2Pac except he wasn’t a dorky follower who decided to be a gang member after a traumatic shooting: he was actually from the street. Kobe struggled to be favored by people because of Iverson’s rise. He was the financially comfortable punk, blessed enough to have been drafted on a team that had Shaq in it, who was beating Iverson’s “get it out the mud” mentality. This was before the Mamba Mentality days; Kobe was just another jock that was defeating the punk rock athlete.
It was the events in that Colorado hotel room, where a 19-year old hotel staffer accused Bryant of forcing himself on her, when his relationship with Black America and NBA fans quietly changed. Black fans, always looking for a way to connect with Bryant, finally found one. He needed to mature. He needed to look within himself to find the reasons why that day happened, and control his emotions — control himself. Kobe stopped being perfect; instead, he was the Black Mamba, the deadliest human alive. The Mamba Mentality was never a stand-in for being clean-cut. It’s a mindset that you achieve in order to mask the fact that you are, unfortunately, human, and prone to mistakes and miscommunications with the general worldwide public. Someone who told police that his teammaate paid off his sexual partners isn’t perfect. Kobe is not Jay-Z, Denzel, or LeBron; he is Kanye, Tupac, and Mike Tyson — the overwhelming schizoid who is struggling with his masculinity and vulnerability. Black men who don't always do the right thing — the most compelling and appetizing kind.. (I always think that they are two types of successful Black men. One is the Jay-Z wing; the other is the Kanye wing. In basketball terms: one is LeBron and one is Kobe. The compelling aspect of Kobe is that he wishes he was the Jay-Z wing. But, he’s Kanye for many reasons: his upper middle class background, his oversharing in a strip mall parking lot about his teammates, his Colorado mistake, the fact that he didn’t marry a Black woman).
Curry didn’t start becoming fully accepted until Durant left. There was that one post-COVID season, his age 32 season, where he averaged 32 points a game. In a basketball world that had gotten used to Curry dominating every quarter, breaking the back of times by flicking his wrist, they instead were shocked to see that Curry had to scrap for every bucket that he attempted. Finally, he was operating on a plane that the grinders of the planet could understand: he was getting hammered every play, and still had to get up and score so his team could just scrape by. People saw that and realized that Curry had more guts than they imagined. LeBron went Hollywood and began to be too powerful; Curry is still an employee. Sometimes he feuds with management; sometimes they are in sync. Like us, work can be both grating and rewarding for him. That’s the way basketball fans truly want it.
Things felt different when the Warriors won the NBA Finals in the 2021-2022 season. It wasn’t inevitable; they beat the Celtics in a hard fought series that could have gone either direction. This is the Curry that you still see today: not dominating, but still great. Having to fight for every basket wears him well. The once baby face has developed into a veteran-like fuzz. During warmups, he ventures a bit far than his teammates while the crowd booms the loudest for him. It’s to show how veteran he is: nothing gets him too excited; nothing gets him too low. The Curry of now would be ashamed to watch the backwards pass he tried in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals. The mistakes he makes now — and he still does so — happens because of age, and offensive dysfunction, all of which are relatively new to Curry.
Watching the Warriors can vary from middling to sad: the easy-going teamwork that they used to have is gone, transferred into a sluggish and brutish pace of play. Rarely is anyone getting easy buckets: Jonathan Kuminga, who will later tell Shams Charania that he didn’t have confidence in Steve Kerr as a coach, can only seem to score off of a roll. The Warriors was never an isolation heavy offense regardless. Still, it would behoove you, once you watch them, to wonder if they should try to go for it this year and start the tear down right now.
Curry’s still spectacular, which is why they will eventually go for it. At one point, in the first half, against the Nuggets, the second game that I watched, he fell down while maintaining his dribble, then went up and swished a shot from the top of the key. It was vintage Curry, a play that had you wondering whether this person should be locked up for being a cyborg. One thing about him that doesn’t change: when it comes to players who aren’t high leapers, Curry is the most bionic out of all of them. Yes, he isn't an athlete like Westbrook, but he’s still freakish. His body control remains ridiculous; his ability to complete the same form whether he is wide open or has people draped all over him is an example of his stupendous work ethic; his fitness — Curry is almost never tired, which is why the Cavaliers defense against him in 2016 was great; Curry was mentally messed up in that seventh game — is still the best in the league.
In the two games I went to – one a win over the Orlando Magic, the next a heartbreaking loss against the Nuggets — Curry had 36 points and 30 points respectively. The team isn’t good enough for him to completely make the opposition sullen, the way he used to in the dynasty era, but he’s still a handful. I sat courtside for the game against the Nuggets; players would yell every time he had the ball. He’s still scary. That’s what made all the idiots who claimed he was ruining basketball so dumb: there comes a time for every superstar where their power dwindles. It doesn’t mean they still won’t be great, it’s just that every dynasty ceases; heroes eventually die. No, true superstars are still kicking at age 34, like Steph is, even when the franchise and the entire city looks like it is going to be fold.
The NBA is no longer about the Currys or even the LeBron’s. Up fifteen with six minutes to go, the Warriors collapsed under the heat of Denver’s length and versatility. In a tie game, Curry made a mistake, he threw the ball away again, right in the hands of Denver’s Jamal Murray. He didn’t have anywhere to go with it, and the Nuggets swallowed up everyone he could have given the ball to.
Nikola Jokic, one of those players that the NBA is becoming about, took an inbounds pass and shot the ball from just over the half court line and sank a devastating buzzer beater. Curry stayed a bit on the floor — temmmate Chris Paul immediately left — to see the celebration, or wallow in his sorrow over the collapse. It was a signal — a horoscope-like sign — that the backbreaking shots that Curry once prided himself on, were happening to him via Jokic. The league is in new hands now, despite the grizzly veteran’s attempts to thwart the dominance of a youth’s prime. At that moment, I wonder if Curry realized that.