Stephen Curry

#1Stephen Curry did not always shoot the way Stephen Curry shoots now.

#2One summer in high school, his father, Dell Curry, looked at his son's jumper and decided it would not survive the next level. Stephen was still small and slight, and he had developed a low release that helped him get the ball to the rim without much strength. Against bigger, faster defenders, Dell thought that motion would get swallowed up.

#3So he tore it down.

#4For a while, Stephen was not even allowed to practice from outside the paint. He had to rebuild where he gathered the ball, how he lifted it, and where he released it. It was miserable. He would later remember stretches when he wanted to give up on the whole process.

#5There was an obvious advantage in Stephen's life that makes the usual underdog version of his story too simple. His father had played 16 seasons in the NBA. Stephen grew up around professional basketball, watched NBA players work, and had access to someone who understood shooting at the highest level.

#6But that access did not come with a promise that whatever Stephen was already doing was good enough.

#7It came with somebody willing to tell him it wasn't.

#8By the end of that summer, the shot had changed.

#9The problem was that college basketball still wasn't convinced about the body attached to it.

#10Virginia Tech was the obvious dream.

#11Dell had gone there. Stephen's mother, Sonya, had gone there too. It was woven into the Curry family before Stephen was old enough to make his own college choice.

#12And Virginia Tech knew who he was.

#13The story is sometimes flattened into “Virginia Tech rejected Stephen Curry,” but the reality was more complicated. The program had scholarship constraints and established guards. The path available to Stephen looked more like coming in without the immediate scholarship-and-role he wanted, perhaps waiting and developing before his opportunity arrived.

#14Stephen did not want to wait around hoping somebody eventually decided he belonged.

#15He wanted to play.

#16He also wanted to go somewhere that was sure about him now.

#17That place was Davidson College, a small college in North Carolina coached by Bob McKillop.

#18McKillop had noticed Stephen long before the rest of the country did, and not even on a basketball court. As a boy, Stephen had played baseball with McKillop's son, and the coach remembered the way the skinny kid moved.

#19When McKillop later sat in the Curry family's living room to recruit him, Stephen did not need the whole presentation.

#20He stood up and committed.

#21Stephen and McKillop hugged. Then the rest of the room folded in around them. Sonya joked about needing to put some weight on her son before she sent him away.

#22Virginia Tech had offered a path that required patience.

#23Davidson offered him the ball.

#24That didn't mean McKillop planned to make life easy for him.

#25Stephen arrived a few minutes late to one of his first official Davidson workouts.

#26McKillop kicked him out.

#27Being the coach who believed in him did not mean being the coach who excused him.

#28Then came Stephen's first college game.

#29He scored 15 points.

#30He also committed 13 turnovers.

#31Thirteen.

#32For a freshman guard trying to prove he belonged at this level, it could hardly have been a cleaner way to confirm every concern about whether he was ready.

#33McKillop kept playing him.

#34The next day Davidson faced Michigan.

#35Stephen scored 32.

#36Those two games make more sense together than either one does alone. McKillop was demanding enough to throw Stephen out of practice for being late, but one ugly night with the ball did not change what he thought the kid could become.

#37Stephen reacted the same way. He did not shrink his game so he could avoid making another mistake.

#38He kept shooting.

#39Over the next two seasons, a lot of those shots began going in.

#40Then March 2008 arrived.

#41Davidson entered the NCAA Tournament as a No. 10 seed.

#42Its first opponent was Gonzaga.

#43Stephen scored 40 points.

#44Thirty came after halftime. He made eight of his 10 three-point attempts, and Davidson won an NCAA Tournament game for the first time since 1969.

#45Next came second-seeded Georgetown.

#46This time Stephen had only five points in the first half. Davidson fell behind by as many as 17.

#47Then he scored 25 in the second half.

#48Davidson won again.

#49Against Wisconsin, he scored 33.

#50Another win.

#51Now a small school that most people had not expected to survive the first weekend was in the Elite Eight against Kansas, the team that would eventually win the national championship.

#52Stephen scored 25.

#53With 54 seconds left, he hit a three from the kind of distance that would become familiar later, cutting the game to 59-57.

#54That was as close as Davidson got.

#55The run ended two points short.

#56Across four tournament games, Stephen scored 128 points, 32 per game. Within a couple of weeks, he had gone from an excellent small-school scorer to one of the most recognizable players in college basketball.

#57Even then, the climb did not stay neat.

#58He returned for his junior season, took on more point-guard responsibility, averaged 28.6 points, and led the country in scoring.

#59Davidson did not make the NCAA Tournament.

#60Stephen had become better.

#61March got shorter.

#62Then came another round of people trying to figure out what, exactly, he was.

#63Stephen Curry was not some anonymous prospect in the 2009 NBA Draft.

#64He went seventh.

#65Scouts could already see the shooting. They could see the quick release, the range, the ability to pull up off the dribble.

#66The uncertainty came from trying to fit those gifts into familiar boxes.

#67Was he really a point guard?

#68If he was a shooting guard, wasn't he too small?

#69Could his body hold up defensively?

#70Could he finish against NBA size?

#71In other words, people did not necessarily miss the talent.

#72They were unsure what form that talent could take in the NBA.

#73The Golden State Warriors were less worried than most. Inside the organization, there were people who rated Curry extraordinarily highly.

#74Curry's side had a different problem.

#75He did not particularly want Golden State to draft him.

#76New York Knicks was the preferred destination. Mike D'Antoni's fast style seemed like a natural fit, and the Knicks held the eighth pick. Curry's representatives made it clear that Golden State was not the destination they were hoping for.

#77The Warriors picked seventh.

#78They took him anyway.

#79It is hard to find a more awkward beginning to a relationship that would eventually define both player and franchise.

#80Then, before either could find out how high the partnership might go, Curry's body threatened to end the experiment.

#81The right ankle kept turning.

#82Curry would return, then hurt it again.

#83He underwent surgery in 2011.

#84The problem kept coming back.

#85During the lockout-shortened 2011-12 season, he appeared in only 26 of 66 games. Then came another operation.

#86This was different from the questions he had faced before.

#87Maybe you're too small for a major college.

#88Maybe you're not a true NBA point guard.

#89Those were projections.

#90The ankle was evidence.

#91It was physically keeping him off the floor.

#92Now the question wasn't how good Stephen Curry might become.

#93It was whether his body would let him stay in the league long enough to find out.

#94In 2012, Golden State offered him a four-year extension worth roughly $44 million.

#95At the time, it was a gamble for both sides.

#96The Warriors were committing serious money to a guard who had undergone repeated ankle procedures.

#97Curry was locking himself into a deal that could look cheap if he ever became fully healthy.

#98They made the bet.

#99The most important part of what happened next did not begin with someone making his ankle stronger.

#100It began higher up his body.

#101Warriors performance director Keke Lyles put Curry through a single-leg movement test sometimes called a hip airplane.

#102Curry, one of the most elusive guards in basketball, did not look nearly as stable as you might expect.

#103Lyles saw a larger problem.

#104Curry's ankles were doing too much of the work.

#105When he cut, stopped, shifted direction, and absorbed force, his hips, glutes, and core were not carrying enough of the load. The ankles were being asked to provide both mobility and stability, over and over, at NBA speed.

#106So the goal became almost counterintuitive.

#107To unload the ankles, load the hips.

#108Curry trained his glutes and hamstrings. He worked on single-leg strength and balance. He learned to control awkward positions rather than simply survive them. His lower body became much stronger; at one point his trap-bar deadlift approached 400 pounds.

#109The rehab did not invent the Curry style.

#110It was designed to preserve it.

#111The sudden stops, hard cuts, direction changes, and constant motion were already part of his game. The point was to build a body that could keep doing those things without asking the same vulnerable joint to absorb everything.

#112The difference began showing up in availability.

#113After playing only 26 games, Curry played 78.

#114Then 78 again.

#115Then 80.

#116Then 79.

#117And that four-year, $44 million contract began to look completely different.

#118Golden State had once priced in the possibility that Curry's ankles might never cooperate.

#119Now Curry was becoming an MVP-level player on a contract far below what an MVP-level player would normally cost.

#120That helped the Warriors.

#121But the contract did not create a dynasty by itself.

#122The basketball around Curry was changing too.

#123Under Mark Jackson, the Warriors had already become good.

#124Jackson gave Curry and Klay Thompson enormous confidence as shooters, and Golden State won 51 games in 2013-14 with a strong defense.

#125Then Steve Kerr arrived.

#126And one of the strange ideas in Kerr's offense was that the team's best ball-handler did not need to hold the ball all the time.

#127Pass it.

#128Move.

#129Cut.

#130Run around a screen.

#131Disappear to the other side.

#132Come back.

#133Pass it again.

#134Draymond Green has remembered that some players initially thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Why spend possessions moving the ball around when Stephen Curry was standing right there?

#135Then they saw what happened when Curry stopped standing.

#136A defender could not relax simply because Curry had passed.

#137If Curry sprinted across the floor, somebody had to chase him.

#138If a second defender leaned toward him, somebody else became open.

#139If two defenders trapped Curry in a pick-and-roll, Green could receive the ball with the defense temporarily playing four against three.

#140If Klay Thompson was waiting on the weak side, you could not abandon him either.

#141Curry could change a possession without taking a shot.

#142That became the heart of what people began calling his gravity.

#143And the farther Curry was willing to shoot from, the more court that gravity covered.

#144Curry did not invent the three-point revolution.

#145That matters.

#146Mike D'Antoni had already pushed pace and spacing. Steve Nash's Phoenix teams had helped stretch conventional offense. Analytics departments were already emphasizing the value of threes and shots at the rim. Teams around the league were taking more threes before Curry won an MVP.

#147Curry pushed the logic somewhere else.

#148He changed what counted as a reasonable three.

#149Traditional elite shooters usually depended on an offense creating the shot first. Drive, force the defense to move, pass, catch, shoot.

#150Curry could manufacture the three himself.

#151He could pull up off the dribble.

#152He could shoot before the defense was fully set.

#153And he could do it several feet behind the line.

#154In 2015-16, Curry attempted 886 threes.

#155He made 402.

#156His three-point percentage was 45.4.

#157The volume was absurd.

#158So was the accuracy.

#159Then came a February night in Oklahoma City.

#160The game went to overtime. The score was tied late. Curry crossed half court with the ball.

#161He could have kept coming.

#162He didn't.

#163With the three-point line still far in front of him, he rose and shot.

#164The ball went in.

#165There were 0.6 seconds left.

#166Golden State won.

#167What made that shot feel different was not merely that it was very far away.

#168It was that, by then, it no longer felt like Curry had lost his mind.

#169For him, that distance was becoming a legitimate place to start an offense.

#170That forced defenders farther from the basket.

#171Pull one defender farther out, and you create space behind him.

#172Send a second defender toward Curry, and someone else becomes free.

#173Soon the effect was visible across the league. Guards took more pull-up threes. Shooting ranges stretched. Big men who once lived around the paint began stepping behind the arc.

#174Curry was not the sole cause of all of it.

#175But Curry and the Warriors provided the most spectacular proof that this kind of basketball could do more than produce interesting numbers.

#176It could win championships.

#177It could win 73 games.

#178And then, after doing all of that, it could still collapse.

#179Curry won his first MVP and his first championship in 2015.

#180The following season, everything became more extreme.

#1811 points per game.

#182402 threes.

#183The first unanimous MVP in NBA history.

#184And 73 wins for Golden State, one more than Michael Jordan's 1995-96 Chicago Bulls.

#185Then the Warriors reached the NBA Finals against Cleveland Cavaliers and went up 3-1.

#186They needed one more win.

#187They lost three straight.

#188Game 7 was at home.

#189Golden State lost 93-89.

#190The greatest regular season in NBA history ended without a championship.

#191That season had looked like the final proof of Curry basketball: historic shooting, historic efficiency, historic team success.

#192Instead, it left one of the most visible failures of his career.

#193A few weeks later, Golden State added another former MVP.

#194And Curry had to prove something entirely different.

#195Could he make himself smaller inside his own team?

#196Kevin Durant arrived in Golden State in the summer of 2016.

#197He was already an MVP.

#198Just months earlier, his Oklahoma City Thunder had led Curry's Warriors 3-1 in the Western Conference finals before losing the series.

#199Now he was joining them.

#200Curry could have treated the Warriors as unmistakably his team and demanded that everything remain built around his numbers.

#201Instead, his scoring fell.

#202His shot totals changed.

#203His threes dropped from 402 to 324.

#204Golden State became even more overwhelming.

#205The Warriors went 16-1 in the 2017 postseason and won the championship.

#206They won again in 2018.

#207Durant won Finals MVP both times.

#208Curry's willingness to share the center of the offense mattered. The thing that had made him revolutionary was not simply that he insisted on shooting from places other people wouldn't.

#209He could also surrender touches when the better basketball decision demanded it.

#210For a while, the team seemed almost too talented to fail.

#211Then almost everything holding the dynasty together broke at once.

#212In the 2019 Finals, Durant ruptured his Achilles tendon.

#213Klay Thompson tore his ACL.

#214Golden State lost the series to Toronto.

#215Durant left for Brooklyn that summer.

#216Then Curry broke his left hand four games into the next season.

#217The Warriors finished 15-50.

#218Thompson, before he could complete his comeback from the knee injury, tore his Achilles.

#219A team that had reached five straight NBA Finals looked finished.

#220Curry, however, returned at 33 and produced the highest scoring average of his career.

#2210 points per game.

#222He won the scoring title.

#223The Warriors still did not make the playoffs.

#224That contrast was useful.

#225It proved Curry remained extraordinary.

#226It also proved Curry being extraordinary was not enough to recreate the old Warriors by himself.

#227The team needed Thompson back.

#228It needed Green.

#229It needed Andrew Wiggins, Kevon Looney, Jordan Poole, and a different collection of players figuring out how to fit around an older core.

#230In 2022, that group made it all the way back to the Finals.

#231This time, Curry's fourth championship would feel nothing like the first three.

#232Golden State trailed Boston 2-1 in the Finals.

#233Game 4 was in Boston.

#234A loss would put the Warriors down 3-1.

#235Curry scored 43 points and grabbed 10 rebounds.

#236Golden State won.

#237Then, in Game 5, something almost absurd happened.

#238Curry went 0-for-9 from three.

#239The greatest three-point shooter ever did not make a single one.

#240And the Warriors won anyway.

#241Wiggins had a huge night. Golden State defended. The rest of the roster carried the game Curry usually carried.

#242Game 4, Curry saved the team.

#243Game 5, the team saved Curry.

#244Then came Game 6.

#245Curry scored 34.

#246Golden State won the championship.

#247His fourth.

#248His first Finals MVP.

#249When the game ended, Curry did not immediately race around the floor celebrating.

#250He dropped down.

#251He cried.

#252It was strange precisely because he had already won so much.

#253But this championship contained the years before it.

#254Durant leaving.

#255Thompson disappearing for two and a half seasons.

#256Curry's broken hand.

#257Fifteen wins.

#258A year when Curry led the league in scoring and still couldn't reach the playoffs.

#259People saying the dynasty had already ended.

#260Now he was sitting on the court with another championship.

#261The fourth title did not erase what had happened.

#262That was why it meant so much.

#263Go back to draft night in 2009 and the ending still looks strange.

#264Stephen Curry did not want Golden State to take him.

#265He preferred New York.

#266The Warriors took him anyway.

#267Now it is 2026.

#268Curry is 38 years old.

#269He has never played an NBA game for another franchise.

#270He has won four championships with Golden State, become the league's all-time leader in made threes, and repeatedly said that he wants his NBA career to end as a Warrior.

#271The ending itself has not been decided.

#272That distinction matters.

#273In 2025-26, Curry still averaged 26.6 points per game. But he also missed 27 consecutive games with a right knee problem.

#274At this stage of his career, the question is no longer whether Curry can still look like Curry on a given night.

#275He can.

#276After a long absence, he returned and scored 29.

#277In a play-in game with Golden State's season on the line, he scored 35.

#278The harder question is how often his body can still give him those nights.

#279Early in his NBA career, the threat came from his right ankle.

#280At 38, a right knee issue has brought the body back to the front of the story.

#281Curry himself has not named a retirement year. He has not declared that his next contract will definitely be his last.

#282When he talks about knowing when to stop, he talks more about two things.

#283His body.

#284And whether playing still gives him the same joy.

#285His current contract runs through 2026-27. An extension is possible. The final date is not fixed.

#286So the last chapter of Stephen Curry's career is still unwritten.

#287But one reversal is already complete.

#288As a teenager, Curry had to rebuild his jumper because his old one might not fit the next level.

#289In his twenties, he had to rebuild his body so it could survive the way he wanted to play.

#290Then the Warriors changed how they used him, asking a point guard to give up the ball and keep moving.

#291And eventually something else began changing instead.

#292Defenders moved farther from the basket.

#293Guards started pulling up from distances coaches once hated.

#294Big men drifted outside the three-point line.

#295Shots that once looked irresponsible became ordinary enough that a new generation grew up practicing them.

#296At first, Stephen Curry kept changing himself to fit basketball.

#297Eventually, basketball started moving toward him.

#298Stephen left Davidson College for the NBA in 2009 without finishing the credits he still needed for his degree.

#299Before he went, he promised his mother Sonya and Bob McKillop that he would come back and finish it someday.

#300It took 13 years.

#301In 2022, while the Warriors were making another run toward the NBA Finals, Curry completed his remaining coursework and officially became a Davidson graduate. A few months later he returned to campus, received his diploma, entered the school's athletics Hall of Fame, and watched his No. 30 become the first number Davidson had ever retired completely.

#302The small college he once had to leave for the NBA eventually became the place he returned to finish the one piece of his old life that was still incomplete.