LeBron James is this era’s best player, but the Warriors guard has become its defining one. In February 2013, we saw a glimpse of the league’s future
Whatever debate once existed has long since been put to rest: the NBA is a three-point league. Teams are hoisting them at a higher rate than ever before – 28.9 attempts per game, at the latest tally. If the season’s trends hold, the Houston Rockets will become the first team in history to take more threes than twos, but they surely will not be the last. Everywhere you look are players willing to hoist it, with the analytics to back them up.
If you were trying to pinpoint the start of this spacious, audacious, and wildly entertaining era of professional basketball, you could do worse than 27 February 2013. In a contest that evening between the Golden State Warriors and the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden, the Warriors’ 24-year-old point guard, Stephen Curry, hit 11 of 13 shots from behind the arc en route to a 54-point performance. Statistically, the game wasn’t really all that different from the half-dozen or so similar outbursts that crop up every season, when a gifted player becomes unstoppable for a couple hours, and it didn’t end up perfectly, with the Warriors losing by four. But to revisit it now, five years later, is to see something singular: a statement of purpose for a different sport.
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