Is 2021 Curry's lost peak year?

[ardee]

Steph is a guy that everyone can agree is great but he doesn't have a single obvious peak year that stands out from the others like a '91 Jordan, '00 Shaq or '03 Duncan.

'15 he won the MVP and the title but it's hard to call it his peak year given it was just the START of his time as a truly elite player.

'16 RS is the best he's ever been statistically and the most separation he ever had over the rest of the league, but he missed a bunch of Playoff games and then came up short when it mattered most.

'17 seems to be the most popular pick on this board, but it's far from consensus given his RS was definitely a level below the standard he set the prior year.

'18 he simply missed too many games and then got outplayed by his teammate in the Finals.

'19 he had started to develop the Playoff resiliency of later years, but seemed to coast too much in the RS to put it over a year like 2016.

'22 he actually seemed the strongest/toughest he's ever been as well as the most Playoff resilient, but boy oh boy did he go cold as hell for a while in the RS.

I think 2021 is such a unique year because he had the epic regular season performance, and had he made the Playoffs, I am certain he'd have shown the same resiliency he had in 2019 and 2022. Even if the Warriors weren't good enough it too deep, even if he had played one or two series, it would feel like his consensus peak year that as it stands, we simply don't have.

[Special_Puppy]

He was arguably the best offensive player in the league that year, but his defense was pretty bad. I honestly don't think single year peaks are very relevant and prefer to just use multi-year stretches to define someone peak (so 2015-2017 Curry, 2018-2020 Harden, 2021-Present Jokic, etc.)

[Throwawaytheone]

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[RCM88x]

I think it would have been pretty unlikely for his playoff run to have been good enough to put it above previous seasons. At best it would be a '18 Lebron type peak argument. Where maybe you can convince yourself that the added experience and confidence in the player puts it over previous statistically superior years, but at best it'll be an uphill debate. The fact he was clearly not at his peak the next season ('22) despite being in a much better team situation informs my feeling a bit here.

To me, his '16 RS is just so far ahead of any of his other years and despite a lackluster '16 playoffs, he bookends that with generally high level playoffs in '15 and '17, makes me still feel pretty good about '16 as his peak. I can kind of ignore the blemishes in '16 playoffs because he proved that was the outlier. So unless he went on some GOAT level playoff run in '21 that dwarfed what else he has done in his career, but that seems like a very unlikely scenario.

[Cavsfansince84]

I think 22 is his best rs but 16 stands out more relative to the rest of the league. As I've said before, I also think its fine for a player's peak to use a rs and ps from different seasons.

[Ron Swanson]

I think it would have been pretty unlikely for his playoff run to have been good enough to put it above previous seasons. At best it would be a '18 Lebron type peak argument. Where maybe you can convince yourself that the added experience and confidence in the player puts it over previous statistically superior years, but at best it'll be an uphill debate. The fact he was clearly not at his peak the next season ('22) despite being in a much better team situation informs my feeling a bit here.

To me, his '16 RS is just so far ahead of any of his other years and despite a lackluster '16 playoffs, he bookends that with generally high level playoffs in '15 and '17, makes me still feel pretty good about '16 as his peak. I can kind of ignore the blemishes in '16 playoffs because he proved that was the outlier. So unless he went on some GOAT level playoff run in '21 that dwarfed what else he has done in his career, but that seems like a very unlikely scenario.

This. I don't see why we focus so much on single season peaks in this specific instance where sandwiched in between an offensive GOAT level regular season ('16), are two dominant championship runs ('15 and '17) with Curry's usual, monster playoff impact signals. 2015-17 is clearly Curry's peak for me.

[Warriors Analyst]

The defensive attention that Steph faced in the 20-21 season was pretty wild. As already stated in this thread and discussed in many other places, Wiseman's impact was generationally atrocious. The only players to put up a worse net rating alongside ANY VERSION OF Steph in >100 mins in a season were out of the league within about 50 games of tallying that net rating. Oubre and Wiseman compounded each other's mistakes and when they both got hurt, the Warriors flourished. That 15-5 run was quite impressive with big wins against Embiid's 76ers on the road, Utah and Phoenix at home (both of whom were top seeds in the West) along with a near-win against the Celtics on the road in which Juan Toscano-Anderson got concussed chasing a loose ball.

Speaking of Juan... check out the Warriors' rotation for the bulk of that 15-5 run:

Steph Curry/Jordan Poole
Kent Bazemore/Mychal Mulder
Andrew Wiggins/Kent Bazemore
Draymond Green/Juan Toscano-Anderson
Kevon Looney/Draymond Green

Damion Lee missed the final 14 games of the regular season with long COVID. Eric Paschall had been exiled from the rotation. Kelly Oubre Jr. was hurt. Nico Mannion and Alan Smailagic were garbage time fodder and Gary Payton II only got meaningful minutes once in that run in the game that JTA got concussed.

The very next season, the Warriors win the chip. Bazemore barely played for the Lakers in the 21-22 season and Mulder didn't stick on any NBA rosters. JTA barely played for the Lakers in the 22-23 season. What you're looking at is a 15-5 run with five players who had meaningful NBA careers after leaving the Warriors. That 15-5 run was so deeply important to the Warriors winning the chip next season. It proved that Steph + Dray could still win with a supporting cast of smart, albeit limited players, if they bought in completely to their roles. In that 15-5 run, Steph faced insane defensive attention and went on a scoring spree that recalled his 2016 peak. I think there's an argument that Steph facing that much attention with such a awful supporting sharpened his game and really prepared him for the 21-22 playoff run and the defensive attention he faced.

Before my post is over, I really do hope people also look at this roster and the 22-23 rosters as a MASSIVE indictment on Bob Myers' track record. What a joke of a roster that 20-21 was. The Warriors sat on their DPE all season, didn't move Oubre at the deadline when it was clear they were better without him, let Wiseman's value peak during a horrific rookie season and then did nothing to fix that mistake, and refused to cut Alen Smailagic after Kerr made it clear he wouldn't play. Guys like Austin Rivers, Georgi Dieng, and Nemanja Bjelica (who fit into the DPE and helped the Warriors win the next season) were all available in trades or in the buyout market post-deadline, but the Warriors didn't seek out a single vet that could have given them sponge minutes or buy some rest for their main guys. Instead, they signed Jordan Bell with a few games left in the season, converted GPII to a regular contract and proceeded not to play him and then lost steam in the 4th quarters of both play-in games when their legs went.

[parsnips33]

Mychal Mulder lmfao I had somehow already forgot about him