I will say had Steph gotten drafted to the knicks, Pringles would have given him the green light on day one so Steph trajectory would have still be the same stats wise
Steph Curry gets credited with "changing the NBA", when it was really Mike D'Antoni
- Thread starter UpAndComing
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Everyone knows how irrational you get when it comes to Steph. This entire argument was completely disingenuous because Steph was an INDIVIDUAL shooter taking a high volume, but the trend was for NBA teams to have the ENTIRE SQUAD shooting at high volume. No one starts telling their centers and power forwards to take 5 threes/game each because Steph is shooting 8 threes/game. There's no logical connection between those two decisions at all.
Second, how would teams suddenly start increasing 3s in 2013 based on copying Steph, if Steph didn't increase his own 3s until that year either? The whole league started ramping up at that point and Steph was part of the trend, he didn't lead it.
Hell, Dame came into the league in 2012-13 and immediately set the rookie record with 500+ threes, over 100 more than Steph had shot in any previous season. Dame actually shot MORE threes in October/November of that season than Steph did. So if you really want to believe that NBA teams were following a player that year from Game 1...it would be Dame they were following, not Steph. Steph didn't take over the 3pt lead until mid-December, then Dame outshot him again in January. Steph didn't separate himself until March, long after NBA threes had already increased across the board.
Finally, Steph's 3pt volume during that 2013-2015 stretch wasn't unprecedented at all. He shot 7.7 to 8.1 threes/game over those three seasons. George McCloud, Ray Allen, Antoine Walker, Quentin Richardson, Dennis Scott, Mookie Blaylock, and John Starks had all put up numbers like that before. Steph was an absolutely elite 3pt shooter, people expected him to try a lot of threes. Now, he MADE them at an unprecedented level, but why would that drive a trend when no one else in the league thought they could shoot like Steph?
The trend was TEAMS shooting a lot of threes, not one player. And Houston is the one that led that charge 2013-2015, not the Warriors.
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threattonature
Veteran
I do agree with this. I give Tom Haberstroh credit because he was early on saying Steph should drastically increase the number of 3s he was taking because he was so good at shooting them so said he just start spamming them. He sounded nuts when he said it but was dead on. D'antoni would've recognized that for sure.
Steph was 23rd in the league in 3pt attempts/game in 2010. He fell back to 25th in the league in 3pt attempts/game in 2011. Was up to 5th in limited games in 2012, but was still below Ryan Anderson, Chauncey Billups, Deron Williams, and Marcus Thornton, basically tied with Brandon Jennings and Jason Terry. And half those guys were shooting 33-34% from three, they weren't even talented shooters like him.
The degree to which Mark Jackson held back Steph's development is crazy. But he's not the only coach who would have done that.
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NormanConnors
Detroit/MSU Spartan Life
This is hilarious coming from someone who's notorious on this board for being beyond irrational about their favorite player.
(pun intended).The fact that you had to start your post off with this instead of simply addressing my actual argument is telling. In fact, you're always up in threads about Steph trying to downplay his impact, ability, and legacy for obvious reasons. It's why you desperately tied yourself to defending Draymond at every turn over the years. You couldn't let Steph get too much credit for GS' success. Unironically, if I truly wanted to be irrational about Steph, I'd be downplaying the likes of Draymond and Kerr as much as I possibly could and giving Steph all the credit, but I do the complete opposite.
Go figure.
It's not disingenious.
Steph is the face of the 3-pt boom. Not the Rockets.
I'm arguing through a lens of how the perception of the league changed. You're arguing purely from a [team] data perspective without any context of what happened, in real time. When the league started to assimilate the 3-pt shot, Steph was at the center of all the discourse. Not the Rockets. They merely piggybacked off of it.
Nobody told their 4s/5s to shoot 3s because of the Rockets either.
Never mind the fact that 4s/5s shooting 3s had already had phases before this era, dating back to the mid-90s with Horry (who took 5 threes per game in the '95 postseason), and then the mid-00s with Marion (funnily enough, under D'Antoni). The only reason why it wasn't linear, constant and more prominent was because the league didn't completely embrace the 3-pt shot during those periods.
You're misreprenting my argument.
I'm not saying the league started copying Steph in 2013, I'm saying that when Steph started to level up as a superstar, leading the league in 3-pt attempts in that season, that it coincided with the first increase in 3-pt average in five years. Keyword - coincided. I literally stated this in my post, that Steph didn't cause this sudden rise, it's just that it ran parallel to the league trending towards more 3s.
Are you going to tell me that this initial 3-pt rise in 2013 was because the league started copying the Rockets, in real time?
However irrational you believe my position is, this is categorically psychotic.
Not only have you not bothered to actually read my argument on what transpired during 2013 (nowhere in my post did I state or insinuate teams were copying Steph that season), but then you have recklessly used that strawman to further downplay Steph by trying to attribute the league to following Dame instead; cherry-picking some stats, bringing up completely irrelevant points like the rookie record for 3s and Dame shooting more 3s during specific months.
Full well knowing that Steph led the league in 3s during that year, the year after that, the year after that, the year after that and the year after that. Full well knowing that Dame has always been perceived as a subplot in the stageplay of 3s where Steph was the one and only protagonist. Full well knowing that whatever arbitrary measurements you want to use for Dame that season, they don't apply to any other season for the next half a decade.
The point isn't about him attempting an unprecedented amount of 3s during those seasons, the point is him attempting the most during those specific seasons.
And this is more than the exact volume, you have to look at the type of 3s he was taking. If he was just a regular catch-and-shoot marksman, attempting the same volume of 3s, he wouldn't have change the game like he did. It's because of the high degree of difficulty that made everyone pay attention, that it legitimized it as a source of offense for a star. Up until that point it had always been perceived as a supplementary shot, largely for role players, but when Steph started taking and making those circus 3s, it became something much more than just taking and making 3s, in a vacuum.
Except, in real time, nobody cites the Rockets as being at the center of that change. Everyone that witnessed that period knows that Steph was referenced more. Teams around the league didn't talk about how they copied the Rockets, or how the Rockets influenced them or even talk about them through an entertainment perspective.
And that's an important distinction to make that although Houston may have taken it to an extreme, as a collective, they were still a background character to Steph.
Truth be told, the only reason why the Rockets attempted more 3s than the Warriors during that period is because they had more personnel that could shoot 3s, not because they embraced shooting the 3-ball more. Beyond Steph and Klay, it was Draymond who was next in attempts, and he would've been an aftethought in Houston when they were jacking up shots behind the arc. GS had more traditional big men like Bogut and Speights, and vets (like Livingston and Iggy) who'd already made a career of playing a certain type of way, and it made more sense for them to keep playing that way rather than changing their shot selection when they couldn't hit 3s like Steph and Klay could.
Whereas in Houston during that period, everyone was roughly shooting the same 3-pt percentages, so it made more sense for all of them to shoot 3s because no two players stood above the rest like Steph and Klay did in GS. The Warriors didn't need all their role players to shoot 3s because it would've been counterproductive to the efficiency of Steph and Klay.
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It's even weird to me that anyone would say the Rockets led the charge, when you already had teams just prior to the boom who were already trying to force the 3-pt shot into the picture with small-ball variations, except the rest of the league was behind the curve.
From the late-00s through to just before 2013 you had:
The Suns with Frye (who had already established a small-ball identity during the mid-00s with Marion)
The Warriors where Don Nelson popularized that style of play (using the the likes of Al Harrington and Cap'n Jack)
The Magic with Anderson and Hedo (even though they ran with more traditional lineups)
And to a lesser extent the Spurs with Bonner and Jefferson.
The only thing that really changed from that point forward is that rest of the league decided to join the party, not because the 2013-2015 Rockets started the trend.
When folks talk about how the NBA changed, they speak about the driving force behind that, and that was Steph. I'm not sure why this is even a topic of debate. We all witnessed what transpired during that period. Citing the Rockets' 3-pt volume as if they were the face of that change is pure revisionism.
From the late-00s through to just before 2013 you had:
The Suns with Frye (who had already established a small-ball identity during the mid-00s with Marion)
The Warriors where Don Nelson popularized that style of play (using the the likes of Al Harrington and Cap'n Jack)
The Magic with Anderson and Hedo (even though they ran with more traditional lineups)
And to a lesser extent the Spurs with Bonner and Jefferson.
The only thing that really changed from that point forward is that rest of the league decided to join the party, not because the 2013-2015 Rockets started the trend.
When folks talk about how the NBA changed, they speak about the driving force behind that, and that was Steph. I'm not sure why this is even a topic of debate. We all witnessed what transpired during that period. Citing the Rockets' 3-pt volume as if they were the face of that change is pure revisionism.
If we wanna be literal about which specific team initiated the change, it was the Magic:
#2 in 3s in 2008
#2 in 3s in 2009
#1 in 3s in 2010
#1 in 3s in 2011
#1 in 3s in 2012 - which makes this season even more significant is it was the first where a team had notably higher 3-pt volume than the rest of the league.
And it was Anderson and Hedo who took high volume 3s as frontcourt players, and the latter whom was largely responsible for changing the dynamics of offense through his 3-pt shooting and playmaking at the 3/4.
They dominated the 3-pt landscape for half a decade, but nobody really remembers them for that because the rest of the league was dragging their heels.
#2 in 3s in 2008
#2 in 3s in 2009
#1 in 3s in 2010
#1 in 3s in 2011
#1 in 3s in 2012 - which makes this season even more significant is it was the first where a team had notably higher 3-pt volume than the rest of the league.
And it was Anderson and Hedo who took high volume 3s as frontcourt players, and the latter whom was largely responsible for changing the dynamics of offense through his 3-pt shooting and playmaking at the 3/4.
They dominated the 3-pt landscape for half a decade, but nobody really remembers them for that because the rest of the league was dragging their heels.
Rockets led the change, not the Magic, because Morey was a far more vocal and more visible promoter of analytics and their impact than anyone in the Magic front office ever was. He was literally running the yearly analytics conferences, and he talked about it all the time. Thus when he got Harden and started running that three-spamming offense, it made noise in a "this is a new way of doing things!", which is the sort of buzz the Magic never really made with Hedo, Dwight, and so on...they were seen by the rest of the league as an aberration, not as a trend-setter.
In your first silly wall of text you tried to claim it was 2013-2015 that mattered most because those were the years Steph started shooting more threes.
Now you've reversed that completely and claim the Rockets leading in 2013-2015 doesn't matter at all and only pre-2012 matters.
Everyone can see how you twist your arguments to justify your desired outcome. You do this every time.
In your first silly wall of text you tried to claim it was 2013-2015 that mattered most because those were the years Steph started shooting more threes.
Now you've reversed that completely and claim the Rockets leading in 2013-2015 doesn't matter at all and only pre-2012 matters.
Everyone can see how you twist your arguments to justify your desired outcome. You do this every time.
shooter and capitalized on thatIt's important to use proper reading comprehension instead of coming into this desperately trying to fight against whatever I posted.
My stance is rational, so stop pretending like it isn't just because you don't agree.
2013 marked the first season in which there was a rise in league-average 3-pt attempts, so I am using that as a starting point for when that era began. It doesn't have to be literally that season, I'm merely using it as a starting point because it's the most obvious one. I'm happy to agree that the start of the 3-pt era came after that. I don't think it's as straight-forward as happening during one particular season, but it's the perodic, non-linear changes that lead into it.
Regardless of that, whether you want to debate it was 2013, 2014 or 2015, Steph led the league in 3-pt attempts during all those seasons, and like I need to reiterate, he was the face of the 3-pt boom. Not just because of volume, but the way he was doing it made everyone pay attention.
Me bringing up the Magic is arguing with your logic. It's why I said "If we wanna be literal about which specific team initiated the change", because if we were to go off your scale then it would be the Magic, not the Rockets, who led the charge. Does that make sense to you? You're not even citing the right team for your set of measurements.
How would you possibly know what I do when you've had me on ignore for the better part of a decade, or so you claim? You're either lying (or misrepresenting the truth) about one of two things.
I haven't twisted any arguments. I've used your own reasoning against you whilst still maintaining mine.
It's funny how the only Steph threads you post in are to downplay his achievements/impact, which almost seems contradictive because you're always championing this era and defending it, yet you do anything but when it comes to Steph. I know why you won't acknowledge that Steph changed the NBA because it runs parallel to Bron's career, and it wouldn't fit your agenda if folks could use that against you (having you on record admitting it). It's much easier to say the Rockets changed it because they didn't win shyt, and because well, they're not your favorite player's biggest rival during his prime.
LV Koopa
Jester from Hell
The Rockets were a really big deal because it was the first time you had a high usage star that could score AND pass at an extreme level and still build an elite offense with 'cheap' role players. Many people predicted Harden being an all-time scorer when he was still in OKC, but no one except Morey knew Harden could be THAT.
Have to remember that the stigma of the Suns was still a big deal at the time. Houston was showing the league how to create 3pt centric offenses that looked nothing like before. The Dwight Howard Magic and Nellie ball looked nothing like what Harden was doing. It's like they took the Dwight Howard lob threat idea and added an all time 3pt and foul drawing volume offense that the league could not deal with.
As I've pointed out, the Rockets took it to the extreme, they didn't led the charge, let alone were the face of it.
Morey is the Master P of the NBA, in that respect, because he didn't really start anything, he was just the loudest and wackest at stealing something that was already in rotation, by trying to make it his own. The Magic would've been recognized more for that style of play if the rest of the league had caught up sooner, that is quite literally the difference between the two teams.
There was no buzz behind what they Magic were doing because that isn't perceived as being part of the 3-pt era.
LV Koopa
Jester from Hell
Biscayne
Ocean air
This is corny as shyt. Steph Curry became the “story” because he broke records and won multiple titles. Kinda hating ass shyt is this? Dantoni while being one of the forefathers, his style always crashed and burned in the playoffs, where calls are tougher and offense slows down, when you play the same teams multiple times in a week. 