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The Haters are Coming for Steph Curry After Finals Loss

Steph Curry did not flop during the 2016 NBA Playoffs. But his failure to win a title will certainly inspire some criticism.

Stephen Curry's journey to the top of American sports celebrity seems less a hand-over-hand climb than a leisurely hike. He was a curiosity first, skimming around and tossing in those trigger-quick threes at Davidson College. When ankle troubles consumed much of his early NBA years, he was not yet yoked to heavy expectations, which freed fans to feel sorry for him instead of frustrated with him (for the opposite effect, see Derrick Rose). Once Curry's injury issues were resolved—for all the self-invention in his game, nothing is more elemental or stranger than the way he overhauled his body to protect his wobbly ankles—his and his team's fortunes alike ticked steadily upward.

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Curry was the focal point of a fun but flawed conference semifinalist, then the MVP on a champion, and then the unanimous MVP of a history making regular-season squad. He shot commercials with President Obama and tossed in 40-footers from the tunnel during warmups. There are always dissenters, of course, but the general vibe around Curry, from casual fans to forward-looking hoopheads to league officials, was one of complete adoration. This was unprecedented, too.

Read More: How LeBron James Rewrote History In The NBA Finals

Over the last couple weeks, Curry has had a lesson in how quickly all that can go away. It started, hilariously, with the release of the Curry Two Low Chef, his white-on-off-white, dad-friendly signature sneaker about which no new joke can be made. The internet loves an easy target, but the quickness and glee with which the world roasted his dorky kicks suggested a growing impatience with the cleanness of Curry's existence on and off the court. Some tame early performances in the Finals—Curry failed to score 20 points in either of the first two games—enabled those inclined to look to find some hints of phoniness; assorted talkers wondered aloud what it would mean for Curry's Legacy if the Warriors won the title and he, as in 2015, failed to win the Finals MVP award. Then, in Game 6, Curry played a middling (for him) game, fouled out, chucked his mouthguard, and got tossed. The unwilling heel turn felt complete.

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In Sunday night's Game 7 loss, Curry scored 17 points on 6-of-19 shooting, with two assists and four turnovers. It was a difficult but fitting end to this latest stage of his evolution. Curry has spent the last two-plus seasons in a kind of happy dawn of superstardom, enjoying its benefits without facing the insistent and unfair questions that make up so much of LeBron James' and Kevin Durant's professional lives. Now something has gone wrong. For the first time in his career, the 2016 playoffs marked an expectation unmet. Curry will not be what he was; nobody gets to stay there for long. He'll have to reinvent, again.

Steph Curry led the Warriors with 22.6 points per game during the NBA Finals. Photo by Bob Donnan-USA TODAY Sports

One drawback, if it can be called that, to the step-by-step nature of Curry's ascent: it can make his success seem like it should be permanent, total, unassailable. Because each chapter has led so neatly to the next, and because the pieces of his game fit together so well, any occasional stumble comes across as a failure of character. We have watched Curry glide through the rest of the NBA for two seasons now, getting out of every manner of trouble with a shimmy or a deft stepback, and so we find it difficult to believe that his relative underperformance on the game's biggest stage could be the result of some just-conceived defensive masterstroke. We do what we know how to do in these situations, which is react. We call him a fraud and a gimmick; we say that he knows it.

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Never mind that Curry still supplied a fair bit of brilliance over the past few weeks. Klay Thompson's 41-point, 11-three masterpiece has become shorthand for Golden State's escape from a 3-1 series deficit to the Thunder in the conference finals, but Curry scored 31, 31, and 36 over those last three games, handling the Warriors' toughest stretch of the year as coolly as he would a three-game stint in February. Despite some shooting struggles, he led the Warriors in scoring over the Finals, and had they won Game 7 instead of lost it, his warping of the Cavaliers' defense, opening avenues for the rest of his team despite his own miscues, would have received some deserved credit.

Even in Game 6, despite the foul trouble and ejection that will take on the look of a tipping point for these Finals, Curry persevered. He ended up pacing the Warriors with 30 points, but more than that, he willed them back within shouting distance after the Cavaliers' initial onslaught, scoring 18 first-half points and hitting four threes. In one dizzy sequence, he pulled up from well beyond the line in transition and canned a triple and, on the next possession, took advantage of an overcommitting Cleveland defense to slip a pass to Draymond Green at the rim for a layup. This burst reduced the deficit, which was 22 points at its most severe, to 8.

During stretches in the NBA Finals, Curry was outplayed by Cavs guard Kyrie Irving. Photo by Cary Edmondson-USA TODAY Sports

Unfortunately for him, the long drought joined the quick burst as Curry's standard modes in the series. He would shake free for a catch-and-shoot jumper or wriggle through for a layup, and then for the next ten minutes find himself hemmed in at all sides. It was difficult to portion credit for Cleveland and blame for Curry himself. The Cavs' defense switched and swarmed, but Curry had shredded such defenses all year. Now, except in starts, he didn't.

When James scuffles, everyone has an idea about what he should do. This is part of what's made his career uniquely criticized; he is so wildly gifted that when he passes we can say that he should just shoot, and when he takes a jumper we bark at our TV screens for him to stop messing around and get to the rim. With Curry, the arguments run up against their own absurdism. What can we recommend but that he produce something miraculous? At his best, Curry's approach inverts the logic of the sport, so when things go bad we can only think: Just do, y'know, that.

For too much of the Finals, Curry didn't or couldn't do that, and so now he will get indoctrinated into the hard part of stardom. It has started already; at the podium last night, he dismissed injury talk and spoke of the importance of the summer, the standard public exit interview for downtrodden runners-up. Over the next few months, while James enjoys the most prolonged calm of his career, Curry's game will be subject to new speculations. Maybe it's too fragile to withstand long playoff runs after all. Maybe it was never built to hold up.

Such talk is rash and silly and reactionary and almost certainly wrong. It's also inevitable. James knows it; he has spent most of his adult life hearing strangers tell him that he should be better at the things he does better than anyone else. His success leaves the talkers needing a new subject, and it is just their good and self-fulfilling luck that here is Stephen Curry, ready to check the one box of NBA celebrity he hadn't yet gotten to.