If that really was a game between the two best teams in the NBA last night, when Golden State smacked a San Antonio squad that is off to the best start in franchise history by 30 points, perhaps we’ve got our terminology wrong.
Think about this: the matchup boasted two squads with the highest combined winnning percentage ever for opponents meeting at least 40 games into an NBA season. And Steph Cury and crew made them look as terrible as the 1948 Providence Steam Rollers.
I’m never one to jump to conclusions based off a regular season game, especially since the Spurs have beaten the Warriors in 13 of their 16 previous games.
But at this point the one thing we can say is that Stephen Curry is unguardable. Against perhaps the league’s best defensive team, he made the Spurs’ Tony Parker, Patty Mills and Jonathan Simmons look about as inept as Buff, Prince Markie Dee and Kool Rock Ski in Disorderlies when they attempted to guard him.
When perhaps the NBA’s most complete perimeter defender took his turn, Curry had San Antonio’s Kawhi Leonard, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year, stumbling around like Zab Judah at the hands of Kostya Tszyu.
If Allen Iverson was The Answer, perhaps Steph Curry needs to be known as The Unsolved Mystery, because guarding him is the equivalent to finding the solution to the Beal Conjecture additive number theory.
At this point, we’re truly running out of superlatives. A few weeks ago, people were aghast at the assertion that Curry had already surpassed the great Isiah Thomas on the list of the NBA’s greatest point guards.
Maaaaan listen, the way he’s playing right now, the only floor generals that I can place in the same category (not above him, but in the same category!!!) are Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson. Sounds crazy, I know, but what Steph is doing, on a nightly basis, confounds all sense of reality. We are witnessing a continual offensive evolution that the game has never seen before, and it’s frighteningly incredible.
In his last five games, against some of the NBA’s toughest competition in the form of San Antonio, Indiana, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit, he’s put on a clinic as a one-man scourge that has the rest of the league shook like Alice and Bill at Camp Crystal Lake.
On Friday, he served up a Triple-Double on Indy with 39 points, 12 assists and 10 rebounds. Against Chicago prior to that in a 31-point rout, he dished out 11 dimes to augment his 25 points and seven boards. Two days earlier, he had LeBron more embarrassed than Ted zipping up his franks and beans on prom night in There’s Something About Mary while erupting for 35 points in the 132-98 annihilation of the Cavs, the best team in the East.
Despite a rare loss to the Pistons prior to the Cleveland game, Curry smoked Detroit for 38 points on January 16th. And last night, in addition to scoring 37 points in only 28 minutes while connecting on 6 of 9 from deep, he also snagged five steals on the defensive end and helped limit Tony Parker to a mere five points.
Make no mistake about it, as formidable as the top contenders are, neither the Thunder, Spurs or Cavaliers are on Golden State’s level right now. And judging by the recent results, they aren’t anywhere close.
San Antonio was obviously not themselves last night, coughing the ball up 25 times, but the recent can of whoop ass that the Warriors have opened against the league’s best squads is shocking.
Let me rephrase that last sentence, because their truly is only one best team that stands alone in the NBA right now.
“No moment’s too big, obviously,” Curry told the media after the game. “We know this is just another regular-season game, but there was some hype around it. Every time we have an opportunity to prove who we are and take another step in the journey, we’re ready for it.”
That’s a scary proposition for the rest of the NBA, who all seem to be competing for second place right now.
