Stephen Curry
Stephen Curry is the NBA’s career three-point leader, a four-time champion, and the only player ever to win the regular-season Most Valuable Player award by a unanimous vote. He has spent every one of his NBA seasons, from 2009 through the current one, with the Golden State Warriors. The more useful sentence about him, because the résumé has been recited often enough, is this: no player since Bill Russell has changed the way coaching staffs at every level of the sport draw up offense, and that change is still playing out.
Akron, Charlotte, and a father who hit open threes
Curry was born on March 14, 1988, in Akron, Ohio, while his father Dell was finishing a rookie season with the Cleveland Cavaliers. The family moved to Charlotte in 1988 when Dell was traded to the Hornets, and Stephen grew up as a gym rat inside an NBA arena, doing his school homework in the Charlotte Coliseum’s family room, shooting in the layup line during warmups, and watching Dell shoot 40.2 percent from three across a sixteen-year career. Dell’s career-high 18.0 points a game in 1993–94 is often cited as the ceiling of a good-not-great NBA shooter; Stephen would eventually describe his own game as “dad, but with the green light.”
He played high school ball at Charlotte Christian, finished his senior year at around 6’0” and 160 pounds, and was not on the short list of any ACC program. Virginia Tech, where Dell had been an All-American, declined to offer him a scholarship. The story the Tech staff gave at the time was that he was too small to guard ACC wings. The story Stephen has told since is that he understood exactly what the recruitment verdict was and that it informed every subsequent decision about his career. He signed with Davidson in the fall of 2005 under head coach Bob McKillop, who had been the only non-mid-major coach to offer a scholarship.
Davidson and the 2008 NCAA tournament
At Davidson, Curry was a freshman starter and an All-Southern Conference selection. His sophomore season, 2007–08, is one of the three or four most-watched individual runs in the modern NCAA tournament. Davidson entered as a 10-seed and beat Gonzaga in the first round, the win in which Curry scored 40 on 8-of-10 three-point shooting. Over the next two rounds Davidson beat Georgetown (he had 25 of his 30 points after halftime) and Wisconsin, then lost to eventual national champion Kansas by two points in the Elite Eight, a game in which he scored 25 but fouled out of the offensive set on the final possession. Across four tournament games he averaged 34.3 points on 47.0 percent shooting, including 43 percent from three on high volume.
The tournament is the reason he was drafted in the lottery. It is also, in the long view, the sample-size point at which NBA scouting departments divided into two camps, one that saw a highly-skilled but size-limited shooter with a questionable handle, and one that did not trust the sample. He returned to Davidson for his junior year and averaged 28.6 points a game, and entered the 2009 NBA Draft the following spring as the consensus best shooter in the class.
The 2009 draft and the early injury years
Minnesota took Ricky Rubio fifth and Jonny Flynn sixth. Golden State, picking seventh, took Curry. The Warriors were not, at that point, a franchise anyone expected to contend. In his first three NBA seasons the team finished 26–56, 36–46, and 23–43, and the second year was interrupted by a series of right-ankle sprains that required surgery in May 2011 and another in April 2012. The early-career injury record is the context for what happened next. In October 2012, the Warriors signed him to a four-year, $44 million contract extension, a deal that, given the ankle history, was perceived at the time as a large risk on a player whose body might not hold up. The deal would turn out to be one of the most undervalued contracts in league history and a recurring sore point for Curry in later CBA negotiations. He has referenced the extension, without bitterness exactly, in every contract-era interview since.
The 2012–13 team, the first with Klay Thompson as a rookie starter and Harrison Barnes, finished 47–35 and made the second round of the playoffs. Curry’s jumper was healthy and the ankle held. That playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs is, in later coach-interview retrospectives, the point at which the league’s veteran staffs began to treat him as a primary-option scorer rather than a complementary piece.
The first MVP and the 2015 championship
The 2014–15 season was the break. Steve Kerr, hired in May 2014, replaced Mark Jackson, imported the motion-heavy off-ball offense that had defined his own career, and, more importantly, moved Curry into ball-screen actions at a volume no previous Warriors guard had been allowed. Curry won his first regular-season MVP, Golden State finished 67–15, and in June the team beat the Cleveland Cavaliers in six games in the NBA Finals. Andre Iguodala was the Finals MVP, a vote that prioritized his defense on LeBron James; the more honest reading, which Kerr has offered in interviews since, is that Curry had the single worst shooting series of his career to that point against a Cavaliers defense that funneled him toward Timofey Mozgov at the rim.
73–9, unanimous MVP, and the 2016 Finals
The 2015–16 season was the best and worst one. The Warriors went 73–9, breaking the 1995–96 Chicago Bulls’ 72-win regular-season record. Curry won his second MVP on a unanimous vote, the only unanimous MVP in the history of the award. He made 402 three-pointers in the regular season, He broke the single-season record and cleared his own previous mark (286 from the year before) by a margin that has not been meaningfully approached since, even by him. He hit the signature shot of the regular season, a forty-footer in overtime on February 27, 2016, against Oklahoma City, off the dribble, over Russell Westbrook, from near the Thunder logo at midcourt.
The Finals that year, again against Cleveland, went seven games. The Cavaliers came back from a 3–1 deficit. Draymond Green was suspended for Game 5. Curry was visibly hampered by a knee sprain sustained in the first round against Houston. He fouled out of Game 6 for the first time in his NBA career and threw his mouthpiece at a courtside fan. LeBron James produced what is, on the statistical record, the most individually dominant Finals since the shot clock was added; the block on Andre Iguodala in Game 7 and Kyrie Irving’s three over Curry with 53 seconds left are the two possessions that closed the series. That loss is, in Curry’s own later interviews, the reference point he returns to when asked about his competitive peak.
Kevin Durant, and the 2017 and 2018 championships
In July 2016 the Warriors signed Kevin Durant, an acquisition made possible by the salary-cap jump from new national-television revenue, and won championships in 2017 (over Cleveland in five games) and 2018 (over Cleveland in four). The Durant-era Warriors won 67 and 58 regular-season games and went 16–1 and 16–5 through the playoffs. Durant was Finals MVP both years. The argument about how to weigh those titles in Curry’s career has been a recurring cable-television topic ever since; the specific point Curry made in later interviews is that his own scoring output went down in those two Finals because there was less of a need to carry the team, and that the championship count is the only metric that compounds.
The 2019 Finals against the Toronto Raptors ended the dynasty’s first phase. Durant tore his Achilles in Game 5. Thompson tore his ACL in Game 6. Toronto won in six. Curry averaged 30.5 points per game in the series against a Raptors defense that rotated Kawhi Leonard and Fred VanVleet onto him and still had no answer. The five-year Finals streak stopped there.
The recovery years and the 2022 championship
The 2019–20 season was a lost one. Curry broke his left hand in October and played five games all year. The 2020–21 team missed the playoffs in the play-in tournament. The roster was old, thin, and still paying out the remaining years of the Durant-era contracts. The 2021–22 team, with the addition of Andrew Wiggins and a rookie Jonathan Kuminga alongside a returning Klay Thompson, finished 53–29 and won a championship, beating the Boston Celtics in six games. Curry averaged 31.2 points a series against Boston’s top-ranked defense and was named the Finals MVP, the one piece of the award shelf that had eluded him. He cried on the court after Game 6. The most-shared footage was of him pointing to a ring finger and mouthing “four” to the camera, a response to the cable-television argument that he had been carried.
The career three-point record
On December 14, 2021, at Madison Square Garden, in the second quarter of a game against the New York Knicks, Curry hit his 2,974th career three-pointer, breaking Ray Allen’s all-time record. Allen and Reggie Miller were in the building. The Knicks stopped play. The record had been held by Allen since February 10, 2011, a span of a little under eleven years. Curry has since extended the lead to a margin that, at the current rate of three-point attempts across the league, is not reachable within the next decade. He is the career leader, the single-season leader (402 in 2015–16 and then 387 in 2020–21), the playoff single-series leader, and the Finals single-game leader (nine, in Game 5 of the 2022 Finals).
Paris 2024
Curry had declined the 2016 and 2020 Olympic selections for rest and family reasons. He accepted the 2024 Paris invitation, and the run is the one chapter of his international career that actually exists. In the semifinal against Serbia, a game the United States trailed by as much as seventeen, Curry scored 36 and hit nine three-pointers. In the final against France he scored 24 and hit four three-pointers in the last three minutes of the fourth quarter, two of them off-the-dribble stepbacks over Nicolas Batum with the shot clock winding down. The United States won the gold. It was the last major competitive tournament in his career that he did not already own the record for.
Business, and the Under Armour bet
Nike had signed Curry out of Davidson but allowed the deal to lapse during the 2013 restricted-free-agent window; the specific internal-pitch slide that misspelled his first name has been widely reported. Under Armour signed him in the fall of 2013. By 2015 he was the centerpiece of Under Armour’s basketball line. By 2020 Under Armour had spun out “Curry Brand” as a standalone subsidiary, an arrangement modeled on the Nike–Jordan Brand split of 1997. The brand did not match Jordan’s commercial scale; nothing has. It did build a second endorsement asset at a time when Under Armour’s other basketball signings had gone dark, and it gave Curry an ownership-style equity position in the business of his own image, a move that players from a generation earlier had not been offered.
Legacy, and the structural argument
The standard case for Curry as one of the ten best players in league history runs on championships, MVPs, and the career three-point record. The standard counter-case, which is heard less than it was five years ago, argues that his defensive limitations, his size, and the roster around him diluted the individual case. The more specific argument, the one that actually matters for how basketball is played going forward, is structural: Curry’s pull-up three off the dribble, from distances that used to be treated as a turnover, forced every NBA defense to extend its pick-up point by eight to twelve feet. That stretched the floor for everyone else on the court. The league-wide three-point attempt rate was 22.2 percent of shots in 2009–10, Curry’s rookie year. By 2023–24 it was 42.4 percent. The math on that shift is not his alone; it is the math his game made possible.
Marcus Thompson II’s biography Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry (Touchstone, 2017) remains the best reported account of the Davidson years through the first championship. No single-player rubric produces a consensus greatest shooter of all time, but the working short list is Curry, Ray Allen, Larry Bird, and Reggie Miller, and among people who have coached NBA teams in the last decade the shortlist is Curry and then everyone else. The championship count is four, the MVP count is two, the Finals MVP is one, and the three-point record will keep extending for as long as he is on a roster and upright. The part that will outlast the individual record is the rubric change, the idea that the best shot is the one that stretches the defense first.
Signature Shoes
Under Armour’s basketball credibility was built almost entirely on the Curry line, which launched with the Curry 1 in 2015 and has continued through the Curry 12. The Curry 4 FloTro reissue in 2022 was the fastest-selling Under Armour basketball shoe ever. By 2020 the brand had spun “Curry Brand” out as a standalone subsidiary, modeled on the Nike-Jordan Brand structure.
Shop Curry Under Armour at JD Sports →
Gear
Shop official Stephen Curry jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or read Marcus Thompson II’s Golden.
Shop Stephen Curry gear on Fanatics →
Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Stephen Curry career page (per-game splits, made-three totals, season-by-season record)
- NCAA men’s basketball tournament box scores, 2008 (Davidson vs Gonzaga, Georgetown, Wisconsin, Kansas)
- NBA Communications, May 10, 2016 announcement of unanimous MVP vote
- ESPN game recap, December 14, 2021, Warriors at Knicks (career three-point record)
- FIBA tournament report, 2024 Paris Olympic men’s basketball (semifinal and final box scores)
- Under Armour Q4 2020 earnings call transcript (Curry Brand subsidiary formation)
- Steve Kerr post-series interviews, 2015 Finals; Warriors team-issued press availability transcripts, 2016 Finals
Shop on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.