NBA Roundup: Steph Is Insane


By: Ross Weber
Just in case you needed more proof that Wardell Stephen Curry II is absolutely ridiculous.
He’s the talk of the town, the league’s best player and biggest superstar. The man, the myth, the legend unfolding right before our eyes, and I don’t know about you but I can’t get enough of hearing about and talking about this guy. If you don’t know about reigning NBA MVP Wardell Stephen Curry II, then I’m about to blow your mind. If you already do know about him, these stats are so crazy, I still might blow your mind anyway.
 

  • You need to guard this guy at half court

Now to one of the most insane stats of all, just how deep he is shooting some of these shots. In the month of February when shooting from 30+ feet away from the basket he made 5 of 6 attempts, and on the season he’s made eleven 30+ foot shots. No one else in the NBA has made more than two 30+ foot shots this year. Also, Curry has made three 40+ foot shots this season, tying him with Zach Randolph for the most in any single season of the last 20 years. When Curry was coming down the court before hitting the 38-foot shot that beat the Thunder, the Oklahoma City bench was yelling at their players to guard Steph from about 50 feet away. You know you’re the real deal if you have your opponents scrambling before you even cross half court.
 

  • His “slumps” are still really good stretches for most anyone else in the league

Statistically this season, Stephen Curry’s worst month of the year this year was January. He played 15 games, averaged just 27.2 points per game, 6.6 assists per game and 4.2 rebounds per game, while shooting a “measly” 49.5% from the field and 46.0% from downtown. He scored less than 25 points in a game a whopping five times, and his team lost an unfathomable two games. Remember, that’s his worst month of the year. I was also going through his game log for this season trying to find a five game stretch in which he’s shot less than 50% from the field this year, and he actually doesn’t have one. However, he has a seven game stretch in which six times he shot less than 50% from the field, and he still averaged 19.4 points per game, which would rank 25th in the association.
 

  • His efficiency is unprecedented…

During this season, Steph Curry has taken 630 three-point attempts and made an NBA record 293 of those attempts. That’s 46.5%, which is really really good. That stat gets better if you look deeper at points generated from those threes, 879 points. If Steph were to produce 878 points on the same number of two point attempts as three point attempts as he’s taken this season (essentially, if Steph shot 439/630 from two point range this season), he’d be shooting 69.6% from two point range. To summarize that, Stephen Curry is more efficient from three-point range than someone shooting almost 70% from two-point range. There are only six players in the NBA this season who are shooting more than 69.6% from two point range, and none of them have taken more than 10 two point shots this year. The crazier this is, he’s done even better recently. His efficiency from three in February (53.6% on 125 attempts) was the equivalent of shooting 80% from two-point range. This man is absolutely insane.
 

  • …Especially considering his quantity

There are 10 seasons in NBA history in which a player has hit 50% of his field goal attempts, 40% of his three point attempts and 90% of his free throws during an entire regular season while achieving the minimum number of makes in each category to qualify as a “league leader”. No player has ever shot more than 1,672 field goal attempts in one of those seasons, and no player has ever taken more than 381 three-point attempts in one of those seasons. This year, Stephen Curry is well on his way to having a 50/40/90 season, shooting 51.4% from the field, 46.5% from three and 90.6% from the free throw line. Curry has already taken 1,146 shot attempts, which would rank third in all 50/40/90 seasons, and he has already 630 three-point attempts, which would rank first in all 50/40/90 seasons by 249 attempts. In fact, in the 37 prior instances in which a qualifying player hit 46.5% or more of their three point shots, only twice did a player take more than 400 threes, and the most attempts any player took was 449.
 

  • He’s essentially doing this in three quarters of basketball

Among the top 10 scorers in the NBA, Stephen Curry (who currently leads the league in points at 30.7 per game) is averaging the fewest minutes at 33.9 per game. In fact, Stephen Curry has not played in 16 fourth quarters out of 57 games this season, which doesn’t seem like that many, but it’s still absolutely insane to think that this man has sat out in the fourth quarter for almost 30% of his games and is still leading the league in scoring.
In other words; Steph Curry is unlike anything we have ever seen in NBA history, and he could be doing this for the next five or six seasons. However, don’t be surprised if all of these stats become invalidated when it is finally discovered that Curry is actually not human and is from the planet Krypton. Which, considering what Curry is currently doing to the entire basketball world, might be more believable than his statistics.
 
(Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/)

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