If you’ve ever read DIME before, we don’t really need to tell you this, but Steph Curry is making the NBA — the best basketball league in the world — look like the over-45 group at the local YMCA. He’s pulling up from all over the court, and his mere presence has turned the Warriors into a machine whose 20-and-0 start to the season seems like just a prelude to something even more earth-shattering.
Normally we’d caution against this sort of hyperbole, but the Lakers’ 33-game winning streak in 1972 — still the longest such streak in NBA history — is absolutely in play. Will the Warriors even escape their current seven-game road trip without pulling their first L of the season? Who knows, but it’s hard to imagine any squad overcoming the juggernaut Bob Myers, Jerry West, Travis Schlenk, Kirk Lacob, Larry Harris and Steve Kerr have put together.
And it all begins and ends with No. 30. Draymond Green and Klay Thompson are All-Stars and there’s a case to be made both are close to the top two-way players at their respective positions, power forward and shooting guard. But when Steph’s going nuclear, like he’s done almost every other game this season, there’s absolutely nothing an opponent can do.
Just look at Andrew Bogut’s reaction after his offensive rebound and dish out to Steph led to a wide-open look in the short corner.
https://media.giphy.com/media/3o8doTCjTCJDumOWfC/giphy.gif
That was part of Curry’s cataclysmic destruction of Charlotte in Wednesday night’s third quarter. And yeah, Bogut’s already taken three or four slow strides the other way before Steph even lazily lines it up.
If you wanna see what confidence in your MVP looks like, that’s a pretty concrete example.
Plus, we had to move our phone across the width of our TV to capture this deep triple Curry hit in that same insane period.
Just ponder this stat from Ethan Strauss, the enviable ESPN scribe who gets to cover this historic Warriors team up close.
Curry's 640 points in 685 minutes have come on a mere 403 shots.
— Ethan Strauss (@SherwoodStrauss) December 3, 2015
Yeah, when DIME’s doing an oral history of the 2015-16 Warriors in a decade, we’ll probably be chatting a lot with Ethan.
Heaven help the rest of the NBA. Right now, no one is even close to this Golden State squad, and Stephen Curry is one month closer to back-to-back MVP awards.
