So, along with Magic, Curry is benefitting from my perspective shaped by how many Top 5 years he has achieved. For different reasons, Curry also is seeing as having weak longevity. Unlike Magic there's an aspect of this that's just utterly mundane:
In my experience with Career GOAT lists, our sense of a player's longevity tends to lag behind what it actually is while he is in prime. It's as if we don't actually look to quantify a player's longevity until it's basically over and done with.
I firmly believe this is something that has been hurting Curry in people's eyes at least in prior projects, and I'd advise folks to ruminate on whether it might be hurting him here.
As I've pointed out, in my estimation he's actually had a pretty long career as star player. Not enough that he should kill other candidates in play right now based on longevity, but enough that I don't think anyone should get an automatic longevity-win over Curry until they've really thought about it remembering it's 2023 now.
I chose an image for Curry emphasizing his shot, which is obviously his big weapon. He's the greatest shooter in basketball history, bar none, easy to see how that's helped him have a legendary career.
The most interesting thing to me about Curry's shot sequence is the fact that it's so clearly NOT about about having a form that helps him be the most accurate 3-point shooter in a vacuum. It's a form crafted to allow him to get his shot off so quickly that it's hard to block, even though Curry is a small guard by modern NBA standards. This isn't the first time a new standard has emerged that's about preventing blocked shots even if it means sacrificing accuracy - that's what the jump shot is after all, and that's what all manners of floaters are.
But the fact that I don't believe ever had a shooter be this impactful before in all the decades of basketball, and he's doing it with such a non-vacuum-optimal approach that adds to the degree of difficulty is breathtaking, as is the fact we are now more than a decade point the point where Curry became the clear-cut best shooter in history...and we haven't seen anyone from new draft classes to this point who seems like he's going to be even close. That could change in a hurry, but is hasn't yet, and to be honest, I'm surprised.
Just a bit of context here: I tend to mark the evolution of the game from a horrifically small sample size playing once or twice a year against teams at my high school. Feel free to chuckle at my expense here, but what I can't help but notice as a 6'9" man:
I used to block their shots like crazy and the games were close.
Now I basically don't block shots and the teams kill us, and it's not because I'm older and even more out-of-shape (ahem, though both things are true).
It's because they aren't even trying to attack the interior except in transition or rebounding situations where the defense (eh, me) isn't set.
And they haven't changed this out of strategy to beat me...that's just how they play now.
If you give them room to shoot a 3, they'll take it, and they all seem to have proficient form modeled after Curry.
They just plain torch us every time, boys or girls. They all shoot from range with a proficiency that us old guys just don't have.
I'll note that I don't teach at a school where students come for hopes of athletic scholarship. Rationally I know these kids aren't great within their own generations standards...yet they are considerably more effective than they were 5-10 years ago because of the way they shoot 3's. And this is why I think Curry is going to go down as one of the most influential players in NBA history.
But again, his influence is irrelevant here and it's not why I'm nominating him. I'm nominating him because that shooting - along with his roving off-ball play and the rest of his game to whatever amount its added to his success - has led him to achieve so, so much as the fulcrum of everything the great dynastic run of this era has implemented.
Okay, only other thing I really feel a need to touch upon here is my man KG:
Breaks my heart having him sink on my list if I'm honest. I desperately want others to be as in awe of what he was capable of as I am, and in another universe, he'd be higher on my list. To some degree I suppose, it's the fact that I'm irritated with what happened in my own universe that I feel such a need to champion a guy like KG.
I realized though as I was going through that last pass year-by-year and considering something like where he belonged in my DPOY ballot that I'd been tying myself in some logical knots putting him above a guy like Duncan. While I can intellectually justify why KG's team defenses weren't stronger based on things that were unfair to him about his context (teammates, scheme, etc), the reality is that in doing so I was effectively projecting what I "knew" about KG back into those earlier years when I did that rather than judging his achievement based on what actually happened - and that gets me back to the question I kept circling back to:
Do I want to do this project by imagining how things would go if...?, or, Do I want to talk about what guys actually did?
Based on the latter, KG just spent a good chunk of his career in a place where he didn't have the opportunity to define an epoch the way that Curry has. Not his fault - you might call that a minor basketball tragedy, but that's life. I can't normalize for opportunity and still talk about what actually happened, so I chose the latter.
