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Sports

Steph Curry's Record-Setting Night a Throwback for a Warriors Team Still Figuring Itself Out

Steph Curry set an NBA record with 12 three-pointers last night against the New Orleans Pelicans. It felt like old times.

Last Friday night against the Lakers, Stephen Curry missed all ten of his three-point attempts, ending a streak of 157 consecutive games with at least one made triple. On Monday against the Pelicans, he more than made up for it. Curry went 13 for 17 from beyond the arc, scoring 46 points and setting a new NBA record for three-pointers in a single game. The Warriors beat New Orleans 116-106, but you'd probably guessed that part.

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As it went along, the game took on the feel of a greatest hits compilation; even if you haven't seen the highlights yet, you have a pretty good idea of their shape and silliness. Curry got a handoff from Draymond Green for a stop-and-pop, put up a quick-trigger shot over a big man with his hands lowered, and, during a broken play, caught a diagonal pass in the corner, pump-faked, sidestepped, then canned the open attempt. At one point late in the second quarter, he wrangled an errant pass on the sideline, split two defenders near half-court, and rose for a rushed and forward-leaning shot a step behind the line, with Eric Gordon's hand at his wrist. Warriors announcer Jim Barnett marveled at the audacity: "If he hits this…" He did.

It must have been nice for the Warriors to see their MVP get back on track; it was less comforting that they needed him to. The winless Pelicans held close all game long, extending an opening run in which Golden State has looked occasionally brilliant, occasionally lost, and usually kind of clunky. As much as Curry's record-setting night impressed, it also reminded everyone watching that the Warriors have not yet achieved what a lot of fans envisioned when Kevin Durant signed on in July: futuristic basketball built around balanced talent and easy choices, with every possession a checkmate.

Still, Curry's outburst provided a throwback thrill. Though Steve Kerr ho-hummed the accomplishment after the game—"It didn't surprise me," he said, and maybe it didn't—it brought to mind simpler days for the Warriors, when they could astonish without the weight of prohibitive expectation. For any superteam, there is a nightly challenge both to win and to build visible cohesion, to arrange all the stars such that each one is maximized; the work of that can make games look like tense, tactical affairs. The Curry barrage, by contrast, seemed like something out of the 2014-15 campaign: some pure off-the-cuff brilliance, with a little statistical notoriety to boot.

The present-day Warriors still have things to figure out. They lack rim-protection; they need to get somebody to provide it or design a defense that doesn't require it. Klay Thompson broke out from inside the arc on Monday, but his three-point shooting remains well below his norm. The offense has that taped-together quality we've come to recognize as the first stage for teams like this, a sense of sets not quite being ingrained and teammates' tendencies not yet being fully known.

If the Warriors remain, for now, more distinct materials than finished structure, Curry's performance on Monday reinforced just how excellent those materials are. Golden State has 75 games left to put it together; chances are, by the end of those, they'll have progressed to the almost boring stage of nightly virtuosity. By that point, we might miss the time when they had to work for it a little, and when big things happened as a result.