BOSTON – Stephen Curry was demoralizing the Celtics when he decided to improvise. After dribbling past Marcus Smart, who happens to be one of the toughest defenders in the NBA, Curry found himself evaluating Robert Williams, a 6-foot, 9-foot center whose slippers could also have been full of concrete.
Curry made a hard haggle, leaving Williams on his way, before stepping off the court to sink a 12-foot float that extended Golden State’s lead in the fourth game of the NBA Finals on Friday night.
It was a familiar but new scene, the same but somehow different. Curry has spent his career filling games with parabolic triples and dazzling impulses in the hoop. But now, at the age of 34, after spending the last few seasons walking the desert of basketball with his teammates, he has been busy making a renaissance.
And it was his performance, 43 points and 10 rebounds with a painful left foot, that made basketball fans boil before the fifth game on Monday night in San Francisco. The series is tied, 2-2.
“He wasn’t going to let us down,” his teammate Draymond Green said.
Aside from Curry’s relatively light stature, 6 feet by 2 feet, is a shrub in the NBA Redwood Forest, it can be difficult for common humans to relate to it. He is a highly trained athlete and the greatest shooter he has ever experienced. He has won two awards for the most valuable player in the NBA. Architect of an expanding entertainment empire, he plays golf with former President Barack Obama in his spare time.
And for five seasons, from 2014 to 2019, Curry sat at the helm of the basketball world.
Few people ever become the best at anything, and victories can seem elusive. You get stuck on the slowest payline. You deserve this job promotion. You also want to be able to buy a home in this neighborhood. But Curry helped the running masses feel like winners next to him, even if they made his team lose.
While Curry led Golden State to five consecutive NBA Finals appearances, winning three championships, opposing fans would go to games earlier just so they could watch him warm up. At Madison Square Garden, where the lights are low and the track is a stage, MVP’s chants were for him. In Los Angeles, Houston, Philadelphia, and Miami, cities with their own All-Stars, roars and crowds, oohs and aahs, announced their arrival.
Along the way, he pushed his teammates to turn basketball into a great art. They fired accurately. They moved with the grace of ballet dancers. And in a sport saturated with large egos and huge salaries, they liked to move on to the open man.
And then came Kevin Durant, all arms and legs and 25-foot jumpers. After losing to LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2016 NBA Finals, Golden State had successfully recruited Durant to sign as a free agent. Was it a cry for help, a recognition that the team had room for improvement? Or did the rich get richer?
“We were the evil empire for a while,” former team president Rick Welts said in a recent interview.
Durant, of course, was formidable before joining Golden State. After being named MVP of the league in 2014, he described his mother, Wanda, as the “real MVP” in an emotional speech. The cruelty of the present day ended up turning that expression of humility into a meme, which would soon turn against him: Between Durant and Curry in Golden State, who was the real MVP?
That question, from social media trolls, TV personalities, and sports fans, was a dig in Durant, but its sharp edge also hurt Curry. Golden State had become too good.
Indeed, Durant was a force in consecutive championships, the latter a four-game sweep of the Cavaliers. There was a feeling of unavoidable inevitability about Golden State: anything but a championship was a failure.
And then the dynasty collapsed. In the 2019 finals, Klay Thompson and Durant suffered serious injuries when the Toronto Raptors struggled to win their first title. Thompson sat down the following season after knee surgery. Durant went to the Nets in free agency. And Curry broke his left hand, losing all but five games, as Golden State finished with the worst NBA record.
Within months, the league’s most dominant team had been transformed into a renovation project. To make matters worse, Thompson tore his Achilles tendon in a workout before the start of last season, and Golden State failed to make it back to the playoffs.
There was no guarantee this season. Golden State had gone from indomitable to vulnerable, a battered version of his younger self. But the team was not completely broken. Thompson’s return in January after a 941-day absence was celebrated as a triumph and no small medical marvel. In his first match, he was shot to death.
The finals have been a microcosm of Golden State’s long way back: a beautiful fight. After splitting the first two games of the series in San Francisco, Golden State lost the third game in Boston, and Curry injured his left foot in the final minutes when Al Horford of the Celtics landed on him in a fight for a loose ball.
Thompson was then left to offer some hope, saying he was “getting great vibes from 2015,” a reference to the 2015 final, when Golden State is ahead of the Cavaliers, 2-1, before waging a comeback to win it all. the first of the Curry-era team.
More broadly, Thompson cited the Golden State postseason experience as positive. When I was younger, he said, there were rags everywhere. Prone to feeling anxious when continuing in a series, he was likely to have overconfidence with an advantage. Now, he was older but wiser.
“You can’t really relax until the final ringing of the closing game,” he said. “This is the hardest part of the playoffs: you have to deal with feeling uncomfortable until the mission is complete.”
Curry slept well after Game 3, he said, and kept his left foot in an ice bucket whenever possible. The emphasis was on recovering and repairing her sore body. (Steph Curry: Like us.) I only knew one thing for sure: I would play game 4.
Exactly 75 minutes before Friday’s opening board, Curry showed up for his pre-match warm-up routine. Dressed in black, with the notable exception of lavender sneakers, he started out doing five bands. He then moved to his left elbow, where he fired a series of shots with his left hand, which is his outside hand, and missed nine in a row to the delight of hundreds of Celtics fans.
But over the next 20 minutes, something strange but not entirely unexpected happened: the crowd began to murmur with admiration and appreciation as Curry sank 136 of 190 shots, including 46 of 72 triples, some of them from inside the field. Fans blew up their cell phones to record the moment for posterity. The children shouted for autographs.
“People think his shot is like Ken Griffey Jr.’s swing. It’s so nice that you think there’s never work,” Bob Myers, the team’s general manager, said in an interview during the regular season. . “But that’s anything but true. When you look behind the curtain, you see the play.”
Once upon a time, Curry’s exploits seemed magical, and they still are. But in recent seasons, as Golden State has wandered through a wasteland of injury and uncertainty, Curry and his teammates have revealed that success does not happen by chance, which requires great effort and determination. Sure they are still basketball wise, but they are wise men who have taught the world their homework.
“Winning, losing, whatever it is, no matter how you play, you have to keep going back to the pit to keep fine-tuning the toolkit and finding ways to evolve your game,” Curry said. “This is the hardest part of what we’re doing.”
After helping force the Celtics into a late checkout that essentially sealed Friday’s victory, Curry and Thompson celebrated by waving their arms in unison. Thompson, who knows Curry better than most, said his teammate had never played a better game in the final. Curry was asked if he agreed with Thompson’s assessment.
“We don’t classify my performances, though,” he said. “He just wins the game.”
At this stage, he knows what matters.