The Hilarious Weirdness of Watching Stephen Curry

A startling and startlingly plausible statistic began circulating around Twitter at the end of the Golden State Warriors' Game 3 win over the Houston Rockets on Saturday. It alleged that Stephen Curry, who that evening contributed 40 of his team's 132 points, had made 10-of-11 three-pointers from the left corner during the playoffs. That's a 91 percent clip.

I write "alleged" because while I couldn't remember any misses specifically, the degree of difficulty suggested that such a rate—one associated with excellent free-throw shooting—would be impossible. Curry took these shots after ducking under the arms of closing-out defenders and after stepping back; he took them after curling around baseline screens and after picking up loose balls. He took one shot from the left corner late in a first-round game in New Orleans' Smoothie King Center, his team down three and with Anthony Davis stretched nearly to the arena's roof in front of him. That one he made, I remember, but remembering is not quite the same as believing.

Curry has defied belief across every category during his current playoff run. He has done so statistically, with the absurd percentages and volumes; on Saturday night, he passed Reggie Miller's mark for most threes made in a single postseason in nine fewer games than Miller needed, and on Monday night, in a loss in which he landed nearly headfirst on the floor, he hit six more. He has done so in the moment, with his octopoid handle and variably arced jumpers.

It is true that we have never seen someone who can shoot off the dribble like Curry, and we rarely see teams that defend on one end and arrange themselves into mercury formations on the other like these Warriors do. But the real fun of it, as they make their march towards the Finals, has less to do with patterns of basketball history than with the constant stream of cognitive dissonance they provoke. They surprise, one way or another, on most every play. Astonishment becomes the strange norm. If everything's unbelievable, nothing is.

The play that has stuck in my mind from the Conference Finals so far comes from the second quarter of Game 3. Draymond Green held the ball behind the arc. Curry, guarded by Jason Terry on the left wing, cut backdoor. Green found him with a bounce pass, but Dwight Howard appeared in Curry's path. Undaunted, Curry jumped off one leg and tossed a floater up over Howard's arm, high off the glass, and in.

This play was less overtly baffling than many that came before and after it that evening. Just a minute earlier, Curry had hit that Miller-surpassing three, a pull-up job from 30-odd feet. In the second half, he put on a finger roll exhibition that felt a little bit like a lark, as if he'd simply gotten tired of the three-point drudgery and decided it might be more fun to cup the ball up over raised Rocket arms from close range instead.

The second-quarter cut-and-floater, though, shows something. Think of the match-up that set had produced: Curry, wispy perimeter savant, face to face with the omnimuscled shot-blocking apparatus Howard, eight feet from the rim, on Howard's turf. Think of how many ways that play might have ended poorly for the Warriors, and then think of the instinct and innate knack required on Curry's part to avoid those endings. A quick catch and flip, a shot Curry might attempt once every other game, and the Warriors were two points richer. It was unlikely, but done with a casualness that suggested they could pull it off every damn time.

This play, and this general mode, also has something to do with the mass adoration of Curry and his squad. The shooter—and even if he is much more, Curry is certainly and maybe principally a shooter, with everything he does predicated on that impossible faculty for putting the ball in the cup—has, historically, inspired less populist acclaim than any other basketball archetype. We like a hoops hero to mix it up and emerge the victor; the shooter circumvents the muck, and has one skill that allows him not to need many others. We can accept him as a foil within the logic of a team or the league—Reggie in Michael Jordan's NBA, or Ray Allen on the Celtics—but as a leading man there is something missing.

That little flip shows what excuses Curry from this sentiment. He is a naturally curious and exploratory player, an improviser. As much as his statistical profile demonstrates patterns in his game, nothing he does feels patterned in the moment. Every bucket and pass, every three, seems the response to a situational riddle. Show any one Curry sequence to someone who has never watched him before, and that someone will assume they're seeing not one of many similar entrants in a specialist's catalog but the single best and craziest play he has ever made.

So far during the playoffs, the Warriors have only grown in their stature as championship favorites. They have stayed mostly healthy as other teams have sent whole factions to the training rooms—Steve Kerr here knocks a wood table into sawdust over Curry's condition—and they have adhered to their effective regular-season and maintained their regular-season results. With each game, they seem to hit some mark or measure that, in historical context, portends good things for their title hopes.

It is possible that LeBron and Kyrie and what's left of Cleveland will give the Warriors a kind of narrative-fortifying test in the Finals. It is also possible, though, that what we had seen before Monday night will only continue, and the Warriors will be champions just a breezy week and a half after the Finals start. If this is the case, we'll have to look away from the usual struggle-story to imbue this team with meaning. We'll have to do our best to remember that the kind of basketball they play is not nearly as easy as it looks.