On Saturday March 8, Stephen Curry joined pro basketball's 25,000 point club while scoring a game-high 32 points as his Golden State Warriors won at home versus the much improved Detroit Pistons, 115-110. The NBA and its media partners count Curry as the 25,000 point club's 26th member because they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge ABA statistics, thereby wrongly excluding Julius Erving (who scored 30,026 career points), Dan Issel (27,482), George Gervin (26,595), and Rick Barry (25,279).
Curry joins Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Michael Jordan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tim Duncan, John Havlicek, Reggie Miller, and Jerry West on the list of players who scored at least 25,000 points while playing for one franchise.
Curry ranks fifth among active players on the career scoring list, trailing only LeBron James (the NBA's career scoring leader who is also the sole member of the 40,000 point club), Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Russell Westbrook. DeMar DeRozan needs to score 123 points to be the next member of the 25,000 point club. Chris Paul is 2158 points short, but the soon to be 40 year old has not scored 1000 points in a season since 2020-21 so it seems unlikely that he will join the 25,000 point club.
Curry, West, and Russell Westbrook are the only 25,000 point club members who are shorter than 6-4, which is yet another reminder of how much size matters in pro basketball. As I discussed in my article about Westbrook joining the 25,000 point club, Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, West, and Havlicek were the "charter" members of the 25,000 point club, and then the club added six members in the 1980s: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving, Dan Issel, Elvin Hayes, George Gervin, Moses Malone and Rick Barry.
Even though the 25,000 point club is not as exclusive as it used to be, joining the club is still meaningful: a player who averages 25 ppg and plays in 80 games per season for 12 years would fall short, highlighting the combination of durability and high level productivity that it takes to surpass 25,000 points.
Hey David, long time reader here; thanks for continuing to include the ABA whenever these achievements happen; I’ve learned a lot more about the history of the game due to researching these players who are often left out of these lists.
ReplyDeleteI have also been meaning to ask if you’ve taken a look at the “Greatest NBA Peaks” series on YouTube by Ben Taylor/Thinking Basketball?
It only examines level of play and skill set at a players peak seasons, not taking team achievements into account, so it ends up being a surprising watch also in large part due to Ben Taylor going back and scouring lots of tape and trying to use both eye test/data.
Would be really interesting to hear your take on a couple of episodes (the Kareem, Walton and Jordan ones are very interesting) even though I can already imagine you fervently disagreeing with a lot of the conclusions lol (all in good fun). Of course I realize you’re extremely busy but just in case you want to burn a couple of minutes.
HP:
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome!
I have not seen the "Greatest NBA Peaks" videos. The drawback of focusing on a narrow subset of games (because, sadly, that is all of the video that is available of early Kareem and early Walton) is that for the uninitiated it can be difficult to determine if a particular game is typical or if it is an outlier in some fashion. There are a lot of contextual factors that are lost on people who are not well-versed in basketball history (I have no idea how well-versed Ben Taylor is, but I am speaking in general terms).
I have seen (but not purchased, for reasons that should be obvious) Ben Simmons' book ranking the all-time greats; he made some valid points, but he also displayed his pro-Celtics' bias while buying into certain narratives instead of checking to see if those narratives are grounded in facts. He, Justin Termine, and others make a lot out of one playoff series in which the Bullets beat the 76ers, asserting that Bobby Dandridge showed himself to be on par with if not superior to Julius Erving--a notion that is, to put it mildly, absurd. I wrote an article addressing various false narratives, including that one: Narratives Versus Reality.
Keep in mind that I advocated for Dandridge to be inducted in the Basketball Hall of Fame, so for me this was not about denigrating Dandridge; it was about telling the truth. Unlike Simmons and Termine, I don't have an agenda or an ax to grind, so I showed that it is possible to justifiably praise Dandridge without making ludicrous assertions about Erving (Simmons and Termine are Celtics fans who want to elevate Larry Bird at Erving's expense, and Termine is also a Rick Barry fan who wants to elevate Barry at Erving's expense).
Steph -- greatest shooter in NBA history, right?
ReplyDeleteAnonymous:
ReplyDeleteHe is on the short list for sure. I'm not sure how to quantify "greatest shooter." Curry ranks first all-time in free throw percentage, but Steve Nash and Mark Price are less than .0075 points behind him. Curry ranks 13th all-time in three point field goal percentage but--other than Steve Nash and Drazen Petrovic--the players ahead of him were role players who could not create their own shots or score prolifically.
Are we talking about greatest pure shooter, or greatest shooter who was also a volume scorer?
Bill Sharman still ranks 15th all-time in free throw percentage; what feats would he have performed in this era where the rules favor perimeter players? Like Sharman, Jerry West played before the NBA used the three point shot. Larry Bird played before the three point shot was a major weapon.
It is reasonable to call Curry the greatest shooter ever based on his shooting dominance during this "analytics" era, but Sharman, West, Bird, Price, and Nash (listed in chronological order) should not be forgotten. Ray Allen and Reggie Miller should be somewhere in the conversation as well.
That's why we look at everything. FT% is one of the best ways, if not the best way, to identify great shooters. Curry has a substantial edge as the #1 FT shooter of all-time and he's actually shooting at his highest clip this season. Curry is a phenomenal shooter from everywhere on the court(paint, FTs, mid-range, 3's, super long 3's, circus shots) as a pure shooter and as an in-game shooter. It doesn't really matter how good of a shooter you are if you can't get your shot off. And while only being 6-2 or 6-3, he does this as good as almost anyone. And then as a volume shooter, at least for 3's, he's by far the best.
ReplyDeleteNash/Petrovic were great shooters, but Curry averages 9.3 3's/game. Nash 3.2 3's/game, Petrovic only 2.0 3's/game. Petrovic also only .841 FT %. They weren't shooting anywhere near as much as Curry either and not as well from every spot on the court. West was a great player/scorer and a good shooter obviously, but I don't see how he's in the convo for greatest shooters of all-time. His FT % was solid at .814, but that ranks only #211 all-time. There's obviously other great shooters who weren't mentioned, but one other elite one who very well might be #2 behind Curry is Durant. Maybe Nash is a slightly more pure shooter than Durant, but not by much, but Durant makes up for that in having a much more diverse array of shots, volume, and his ability to get his shot off much easier than Nash.
Sharman was a great FT shooter though #15 all-time and would be only 4th among active players if he played today, but was he able to shoot extremely well from everywhere inside the halfcourt line anywhere like Curry? These other guys shouldn't be forgotten, sure, but I can't see how they'd be viewed better than Curry. Overall, Durant seems closest to me.
Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteIf we use FT% as "the best way," then Curry is only the greatest shooter by a very small margin over Nash and Price.
Sharman led the league in FT% a record seven times. Curry has four FT% crowns. The playing conditions and rules in Sharman's era were so different than they are now that it is difficult to compare, but by all accounts (and by the numbers) he was an incredible shooter.
We shouldn't compare three pointers per game because the modern numbers are so skewed (and because Sharman and West played their entire careers before the three point shot era).
I agree that Durant should be mentioned in this conversation as well.
While certainly not an exact science I think the extra degree of difficulty on many of the shots Steph takes and makes and the comparatively bananas defensive coverages schemed up to try and chase him specifically off of the three in a way no one else in this conversation ever really faced more than make up for the marginal edge that a small handful of guys have on his raw 3pt%.
ReplyDeleteNash and Price were great shooters but they generally took fairly traditional threes off catch-and-shoots or in semi transition. Drazen, Reggie, and Ray could make some petty wild ones off picks and handoffs. Curry does all of that, and also makes video game circus shots off the wrong foot, falling out of bounds, or from forty feet away at such frequency that a compilation of his wackiest makes for any given season is almost guaranteed to generate a ten minute YouTube reel.
He also has step-back and isolation moves to self-create threes that really nobody above him had and only a few people below him have even lesser versions of.
While I agree that it's important to honor history and the forebearers I also don't think there's much credible analysis other than pure brain-off 3pt percentage counting that's going to return any result other than Curry for Greatest Shooter Ever, though with the way the game is trending the Jordan to his Baylor may well be just around the corner.