Steph is starting and finishing a lot more than he used to have to, and he’s done it at 34 with his own injury concerns. Or that Steph wasn’t any good in the Final itself, even though there are more than enough virtuoso performances there to disprove that.Īnd Steph has been up against it this spring, with Thompson not really himself after his leg turned to cottage cheese over the past three years, Draymond Green unable to ignite the offense like he used to (if not outright driving it into a ditch), and merely a gaggle of contributors instead of another star around (Jordan Poole cameos aside). It only gave credence to the (false) view that Curry was along for the Kevin Durant ride, even though he’d already garnered two MVPs, a ring, and the greatest season ever without him. So the knives have been out for Curry for a while, and certainly there was no little glee in the Warriors literally falling apart in the 2019 Finals and then the struggles of the past two seasons as the roster was reconstructed and Curry and Klay Thompson battled injuries. How dare this little mite take over the league in such a way? Steph certainly was never in the mold of MJ, Kobe, Magic, or LeBron, and definitely not the great centers of yore either. ![]() These days, in all sports, the greatness of one player is a threat to either another, someone in the past, or the very way we view the sport. A lot of the ire Steph sees is either the result of basketball parochialsim and fans protecting their chosen favorite or those railing at the three-point-ification of the NBA, which Steph will always be the face of. There’s a lot of fans who have to fight the instincts built over decades to decree yet another launch from 33 feet a bad shot, if not slap your forehead and exclaim, “WHAT’RE YOU DO….” before the ball expectedly only slightly disturbs the net as it passes through serenely. Unlike Stamkos, he can claim to have changed, if not warped, the entire game. ![]() Steph, much more so than Stamkos, has always been somewhere around the heated NBA debates for the past seven years. ![]() And both have a ton of observers asking themselves, “How did we forget about this guy?” Both have had to pull their teams out of the muck at times, make up for injured or non-performing teammates, and both have come up with some of the biggest moments and performances in their career. Steph Curry (l.) and Steven Stamkos Illustration: Getty ImagesĪs the NBA Finals move into their business end, and the Stanley Cup Final gets ready to kick off tomorrow, both of the conversations around them center around two players who were thought to be past it and yet are the main reason their team is where they are, i.e.
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