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On Tuesday night, James Harden toppled a record held by Stephen Curry.
It wasn’t a memorable record — Atlanta’s State Farm Arena didn’t stop play and commemorate the moment — but it does tell us so much about the state of the modern NBA game.
It also highlights how instrumental Curry has been — and still is — to the revolution.
Harden shot his 887th 3-pointer of the season in the Rockets’ game against the Hawks Tuesday, breaking Curry’s three-year-old record for most 3-point attempts. Harden will surely shatter that prior record — he’s likely to go over 1,000 3-point attempts this season.
But again, no one freaked out. Harden shoots 13 3-pointers a game — nearly double what the most prolific 3-point shooter put up eight seasons ago — but that number of attempts doesn’t seem all that out of the ordinary. Twenty players this season average more 3-point attempts per game than Ryan Anderson’s league-leading number in 2011-12.
It’s a drastic change from the not-to-distant past, but the 3-point shot is the defining action of the NBA in 2018-19 and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future.
Perhaps this era of basketball would have come about on its own. Perhaps the data — which backs up the pragmatism of shooting 3-pointers — would have eventually won out over orthodoxy.
But those are just hypotheticals because of Curry.
There’s perhaps no term the Silicon Valley loves to use more than “disruption”. To be labeled a “disruptor” in your field is perhaps the highest compliment one could give around here.
Forgive me, but I have to do it: Curry is a disruptor.
And while he is far from the only reason behind this ongoing 3-point revolution, he, like so many great disrupters, took something that already existed or perhaps was in the midst of happening and made it his own.
He pushed the theorized limits to the nth degree, and with his power of personality and unparalleled, timely execution, he created a complete paradigm shift in the process.
In his first three years in the NBA, Curry attenuated an average of 4.7 3-pointers per game — putting him firmly in the 20s on the NBA’s leaderboard for that category each year. The most prolific 3-point shooters of the time were Anderson, Dorrell Wright, and Aaron Brooks.
But after two career-saving ankle surgeries, Curry came out firing. He averaged 7.7 attempts from distance per game in 2012-13 to lead the league. He shot more 3-pointers than anyone else —7.9 per game — over the next three years.
The final year of that stretch, 2015, Curry was named the NBA’s MVP. He averaged 8.1 3-point attempts per game and led the Warriors to their first title in 40 years.
He was a sensation, but he wasn’t a revolutionary yet.
No, the revolution began the next season — the Warriors’ 73-win campaign.
In 2015-16, Curry posted arguably the greatest offensive season in NBA history and won the league’s first unanimous MVP award.
And he took his game to a new level by doing the same thing he did before and after this ankle surgeries — he added three additional 3-point attempts, on average, to every game.
In all, Curry shot 240 more 3-pointers in his second MVP season than he did in his first, breaking the NBA record for attempts — previously held by Dallas’ George McCloud — by 208.
Everyone had to pay attention. And sure enough, the entire league caught 3-point fever.
In the unanimous MVP season, when Curry attempted 886 3-pointers and made 402, only 32 players averaged five or more 3-point attempts per game.
The next season, 49 players shot at least five 3-pointers per game.
Last season, that number was 66. We’ll probably be around that same number again this season.
There’s a clear correlation between Curry’s 3-point attempts per game and the NBA’s league-wide increase in taking the shot. His jumps coincided with the league’s jumps — it’s up to you to determine if that’s a coincidence or not.
Of course, anyone can jack up a bunch of 3-pointers — McCloud, Anderson, Wright, and Brooks were hardly household names, after all. (They’re so anonymous that I questioned eschewing the AP style guide and using their first names on the second reference — certainly, some of you fine readers have understandably forgotten who the hell those people are.)
But it’s in that area that Curry separates himself. He’s not just shooting a bunch of 3-pointers, he’s making a bunch of them too.
With Curry, you don’t have to debate quality over quantity — you get both.
Over the last five seasons, both Harden and Curry have shot roughly 3,500 3-pointers.
But Curry has shot 43 percent on those attempts, while Harden is shooting 36 percent.
Harden might be at the vanguard of 3-point attempts over the last few years, but for the last seven seasons — including this season — Curry has led the league in 3-pointers made per game.
And last time I checked, the game is still about putting the ball in the basket. Harden, despite firing more than 1,000 3-pointers this season, isn’t likely to come close to Curry’s 3-pointers made record of 402.
A few weeks ago, Warriors forward Andre Iguodala called Curry underrated. Iguodala even opined that the Baby Faced Assassin is the second-greatest point guard of all-time.
Iguodala is a sharp guy and I agree with him that Curry is still underrated. But Iguodala is part of that problem — he’s underrating him, too.
Magic Johnson, whom Iguodala said is the best point guard ever, might have immense star power and enviable accolades, but he wasn’t at the vanguard of fundamental change in how the game is best played.
Curry is.
This era of 3-point happy NBA basketball isn’t a fad, and it has Curry’s fingerprints all over it.
Now that’s a legacy. And one that’s not done being written quite yet.
After all, the waves that have come from his impact on the game are still cresting and at 31, he still has the ability to push the limits that much more.
Curry could retire at the end of the season as the greatest point guard of all time — that’s how sizable his influence on the game has already been.
It will just take the world a while to catch up to that reality — it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees and Curry’s indelible impact amid all these threes.
