Post#378 » by therealbig3 » Tue Jan 5, 2021 5:48 am
Curry has a great argument to be the 2nd best player of the 2010s after LeBron (Durant and CP3 are in the conversation too, although I would take Curry), so most reasonable people know that he's great and can certainly explode the way he did against the Blazers, and he is good enough to take a bad team and make them somewhat respectable.
I think the next level doubts about Curry from people like myself is if he can play at an offensively elite level in the playoffs against focused and more talented defenses. Thus far, his career track record says "kinda, but not at GOAT-level". Maybe that's the disconnect? Because some people see him as offensive GOAT-level, and in relation to the PS, I don't see it. That doesn't mean he's not historically great in the RS though, and that doesn't mean he's still not one of the super elite players in the game. Of course he is.
I think there are two sides to the Curry "hate" btw. Of course, there are people with biases and prejudices that just hate. That's always going to happen.
But imo, I also think there is a push by quite a few people to crown Curry as this ideal offensive basketball player and elevate him to levels he hasn't exactly proven he deserves. A LOT of praise is given to his gravity and his shooting ability and the motion offense he's the engine of, as if this is the ideal way to play basketball, and yet, this ideal basketball has gotten stifled more often than not, and they didn't truly dominate until they brought in "ugly" ISO basketball. And any objective examination of the Warriors' offense during that 2015-2019 stretch gets called hating, or a lot of blame gets deflected to other people on his team, or it's swept under the rug of team success, without actually acknowledging that much of their team success was mainly because of outstanding defensive performance and a good enough but not dominant offensive run, which was frequently underwhelming in fact. Durant and Westbrook are two of the most criticized stars of the generation, and their ISO ball habits and ugly offensive system in OKC gets constantly brought up as the wrong way to play basketball in contrast to the beautiful offensive system of Curry and GS...and yet, OKC's playoff offense in 12 and 16 with Westbrook and Durant outperformed the 15 and 16 Warriors playoff offense...by a lot.
So yeah, I think most objective people know that Curry is a dominant RS player and a very, very good playoff performer. And yeah, there are haters out there. But I think Curry homerism is just as big of an issue (on this board at least) as Curry hate is. Because LeBron, Kobe, Nash, Dirk, Garnett, Duncan, Shaq, etc have ALL had their team successes (and failures) micro-analyzed and broken down and the best efforts were made to objectively assign "credit" to the appropriate people in order to truly evaluate the player's performance...but there's resistance to this for Curry, idk why.
For example, any other superstar would have been eviscerated for milking an injury to last an entire season so that their team could tank and he could avoid the negative attention of not being able to "carry" a team to the playoffs. Nary a peep on Curry though, outside of some GB posters here and there. And the amount of injury excuses he gets are second to none for any superstar. Like, some people have brought up injuries being a reason for his subpar play in 2015...when no significant injury was ever identified. They just kind of group 2015 and 2016 together though and claim "injury!" And, how much did we hear about LeBron's elbow injury in 2010, or his back injury in 2015? How about Kobe's various injuries throughout multiple playoff runs? Barely. Yet Curry in 2016 screams "I'm back!" and is clearly able to show boat and play really well in a playoff win over Portland, but you still have people acting like he was a paraplegic just a few games later in that playoff run when he was laying eggs.
IDK, I know I'm coming off as a huge hater because he JUST dropped 62 and had another great performance in a blowout win tonight, and that's really not my intention, I'm just never a fan of the "See haters? Gotcha!" stuff, when the legit criticisms don't actually go away just because he has a great RS stretch.
EDIT: like, the "Curry exposed" stuff or "Curry's legacy is on the line" stuff based on if he could lead G-leaguers to the playoffs was ridiculous, obviously, and so it is poetic justice that he then drops 62 points to shut those people up. I feel there's a difference between those kind of doubters, and those that acknowledge Curry's greatness but are unsure if he's quite AS good as he's propped up to be by a lot of people.
