CURRY SMILES, IGNORES THE BUZZ, WINS THE MVP — AND THINKS ABOUT A TITLE
He hears complaints about too many NBA three-pointers, but he’ll never say the Warriors can’t compete for another championship — which, by the way, would be his fifth and one ahead of LeBron James
The smile is what we’ll always celebrate about Stephen Curry. He smiled 17 years ago, a kid from Davidson, where he played in the charming backwoods when Duke and North Carolina rejected him. He smiled a decade ago, when he stopped a workout in Oakland and told me why he needed to shoot to live.
And he smiled Sunday evening in San Francisco, his 36 years beginning to crinkle his face, a beard stretching from earlobe to earlobe as he clutched the MVP trophy of an All-Star Game. Astonishing, isn’t it, how the bombs-away gunner who is killing the NBA still thinks he can win a fifth championship? That’s what Curry said, sitting on the dock of the Bay after leading Shaquille O’Neal’s OGs past Charles Barkley’s Global Stars — if that is what a once-glorious event regrettably has become.
“This is just a special weekend all the way around. This is very symbolic of the entire journey,” Curry said of his days in northern California. “I hope we have a lot to accomplish on the court, not ending the journey any time soon. But again for me and from my vantage point having played here for 16 years and this is the only place that I’ve played, it’s just a great celebration of basketball in this area.”
No one is rooting against Curry when we say 30-foot lasers have brainwashed the rest of the league. We blame the copycatting of other teams, not him. And when the Golden State Warriors invaded the league’s wilderness and acquired Jimmy Butler, many of us dismissed it as a cheap chance for Draymond Green to punch another teammate. But in Curry’s mind, it gives his team a Western Conference opportunity when Oklahoma City and Memphis are the youthful leaders, unless we count Nikola Jokic and Denver.
Imagine if Curry, helped by Butler instead of mortified, leads one last charge toward the Finals. A title, if we can dream, actually would give him one more ring than LeBron James, who still has four and sometimes forgets Curry could overtake him in his own generation. LeBron has Luka Doncic at his side but doesn’t have a center or a coach beyond his rookie season. For those convinced James is stuck in his own perpetuated image after 22 years, with his son as a teammate — it’s impossible to complain if Curry wound up as the championship leader of his era.
Five.
One short of Michael Jordan, who also won in only one place.
“We’re going to win the championship,” Green said Sunday. When asked to repeat his claim, he said, “We are going to win the championship. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Draymond is being Draymond when he won’t mention the Warriors are 28-27, barely in the playoff picture while tied for ninth place in the conference. But Butler has impressed everyone, including Curry, in a 3-1 start since his trade from Miami. This is a honeymoon period when he’s primed to one-up his many critics. He always could crack and descend emotionally for any reason. At present, he’s a savior.
“He’s here for a reason, to get us to the next level,” Curry said. “You look at his body of work. It seems like when the stakes get higher, he rises to the occasion. He’s a dog. He’s a winner. And just the idea he has a lot to prove with a new situation, I know he’s excited to help us. We’re excited to help him. I like a motivated, hungry team with Jimmy on there and the vets we have to try to put it together.”
Green dares to take another step for Butler. “He's a franchise changer,” he said. “He's done that everywhere he's gone, and he is helping revitalize what we got here. The belief amongst this team, now that he's arrived, as opposed to what it was before he got here, it's night and day. Just having a guy like that changes everything for us. The assessment on him after four games: It's great."
Night and day? Does Steve Kerr agree? “Jimmy, he's a real deal,” the coach said. “I mean, just a complete basketball player, methodical, under control all the time, plays at his own pace, never turns it over, sees the game and then can get to the line frequently. Great closer, not in the traditional sense where he's going to be Kevin Durant and make four straight midrange jumpers, but it's more of a complete game. Get to the line, make the right pass, get somebody else an open look, get a defensive stop, get a rebound. He's a fantastic player.”
Remember: Butler has played in two Finals since 2020. All we remember is his cage fight with Pat Riley, who lost and traded him to the Warriors, where owner Joe Lacob gave him a two-year, $121 million extension. Butler wants us to focus on his fifth franchise when we know Miami, Philadelphia, Minnesota and Chicago didn’t end well. “We should be 4-0,” Butler said. “I am not going to lie to you. I have been sick to my stomach because of it since I got here. But we are going to figure it out. We are going to go streaking.”
Any winning streak will have our attention. It’s fun watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Donovan Mitchell, but what the NBA needs is a Celtics-Warriors rematch. You want ratings? You want the NFL offseason pushed aside? Give us Curry and Butler against Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
The weekend generally was dull. The new format, featuring a four-team tournament, won’t help those who think All-Star Games should fade off. Green ripped away, saying broadcast partner Candace Parker wasn’t excited to coach a Rising Stars team Sunday night. “Candace goes, ‘I’m coaching some team’ and that's right, some team that no one wants to see,” he said. “I had to work so hard to play Sunday night of All-Star weekend. And because ratings are down, because the game is bad, we're bringing in rising stars? That's not a fix. And these guys get to touch the All-Star floor? On Sunday night?”
He wasn’t finished. “In America, the president has Air Force One, right. They have several of those planes. It's only Air Force One if the president is on it. That's the All-Star floor,” Green said. “Those guys did not make the All-Star team. To be playing in the All-Star Game and not mae the All-Star team is absurd.”
At least Curry tried. “It brought a lot of my people together that have helped me along the way. Or have been a part of the journey and I got to kind of reflect a little bit,” he said. “But I’m excited to get back to work next week.”
He was smiling.
Never stop.
###
Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.