Stephen Curry Challenges Everything, And Wins

It's hard to find language that, when applied to Stephen Curry, is hyperbolic. Curry really and truly is all of the following things: unfair, futuristic, serial author of impossible highlights, and someone having one of the great seasons in league history. There is no way the conversation around his crescendo into MVP form could be anything but ridiculous, overheated, and overstated. Anything else would be insufficient.

Charles Barkley is just one of the many silly speakers in the Curry discourse, if one with an unusually loud megaphone and endearingly offbeat diction. A tireless defender of an uglier NBA, Barkley refuses to accept the rule changes and paradigm shifts that have conspired to allow a svelte, happy-footed three-point bomber to dominate the league. The sport has been tweaking the parameters of the game in subtle ways throughout this century, with "freedom of motion" initiatives leading the way. No one fits better into the trajectory set forth by these changes than Steph; no one in the league seems to have benefitted more from the changed game they've created. This is a problem for people who want to make it one.

Barkley remains steadfast in his insistence that a "jump-shooting team" cannot win a title; it's a point he makes whenever Curry's Golden State Warriors are mentioned as contenders. The Warriors dropped an elimination game in Houston on Monday night, in a loss that saw Curry absorb and apparently shake off a scary head injury, but have generally romped through the playoffs, looking more inevitable by the game. Barkley, naturally, has held his ground, going so far and so strangely as to say that "jumpers are like pretty girls…When you realize that pretty girl is dumb, you're in for a long date." The Warriors, apparently unbothered by the quip, romped into the NBA Finals on Wednesday, exactly as they had romped through the rest of the season.

It has never been uncommon for Barkley, or any ex-player, to rage nostalgically against contemporary champions, and to sound uninformed and somewhat afraid while doing it. For Barkley, watching Curry perform his dexterous ballet every night—a wild, unprecedented basketball act that's powered by a kind of beautiful arrogance—must be like watching the Grim Reaper dance on his doorstep. But Chuck is far from alone in not knowing what he's talking about, when it comes to this particular player. Everyone in the mainstream NBA discourse struggles to put words to what Stephen Curry does, if only because we, and they, have never seen it before.

Even for progressive-minded NBA fans, the default emotion where Curry is concerned is a sort of crazy, jealous confusion. Curry is the best possible result of the NBA's evolution, reinventing the proportions of the court as he turns the space outside the arc into a proving ground more fertile than the air near the rim. There is something frightening about how good he is, and even more so about the way in which he is good.

Curry has silenced all reasonable criticisms of his game, by this point, both because of how much better he has become at attacking the basket and because of how much better he is at being Steph Curry. Perhaps most impressive is how he became a better penetrator. He has notably not beefed up and become better at taking contact, but simply continues to make defenders miss, overwhelming them with skill and trickery. He has avoided needing to have a prototypical NBA Body by becoming a master of space and elision. Other NBA bodies are lucky to even touch him.

When he brought his daughter Riley to the podium after a Game 1 win over the Rockets last week, the meme-y #BabyGate fiasco that ensued was the public seizing its opportunity to pin Steph's bullet-train brilliance onto something like a human spectrum—to hold him in our hands for a moment, before he takes off in the direction of his choice and wows us again. Discussing how he alters the game is hard; we're usually reduced to nonsensical statements of aggrandizement when we do, largely because we don't yet have the words for it. Seeing him as a father, capable of love and humor and patience, is stirring because it reveals the humanity of a man who seems like he's from another species on the court. It makes sense that the Hot Take Community would be upset by it, if only because he is dictating the sentiment, and not them.

Steph's public fatherhood may be refreshing and relatable, but he is not like any other person as a basketball player. Comparing him to his predecessors always results in hypothetical science experiments, involving the fusing of two talents—how did Pete Maravich steal Reggie Miller's shooting? What if Steve Nash ate Ray Allen? Curry continues to surprise us so much, though, that even these preposterous create-a-player scenarios don't quite explain him. He makes defenders and fans alike miss, leaves us fumbling with our words as he does something amazing, and then leaves us speechless. He shuts us up, and it's a pleasure.