How Will Stephen Curry Age? (2023 update)

using RAPTOR, Nash, Miller, Price, Abdul-Rauf and Dell

(2023 UPDATE) My original study was published more than three years ago on 2020-03-06. I find it very interesting to look at my original discussion as it was in the time when Steph was missing a whole season from his broken hand and the conventional wisdom was that Steph was in decline and unlikely to challenge for a title again, much less actually win the 2022 Finals. So I will add my 2023 updates inline.

Stephen Curry turns 32 on March 14th, 2020.

(2023 UPDATE) Stephen Curry turns 36 on March 14th 2024.

He remains the cornerstone of the Golden State Warriors. He is expected to recover fully from his broken non-shooting hand, but GSW is due to pay him $45.8M for the 2021-22 season, when he turns 34.  Conventional wisdom expects a basketball player’s peak to be around age 29, so we have likely already seen the absolute heights of Curry’s production. Curry has said he wants to play 16 years total or until he is 36 in the 2024-25 season.

(2023 UPDATE) Steph had a dazzling championship season in 2021-22 and had all-time moments in the 2023 playoffs, including his 50 point Game 7 to save GSW vs SAC.

Steph said on 2022-09-12 that he wants to play four more years, i.e. through the 2025-26 season. He will turn 38 in that season.

So we ask: How will Curry play over the rest of his career?

No one can predict the future, but we can compare the career arcs of interesting comparison cases, first using 538’s RAPTOR and then looking closer at the cases.  

RAPTOR Projections

Let’s first look at the prediction of RAPTOR, 538’s aging model as of Oct 22, 2019. They find players with similar statistical profiles and then look at the spread of different career outcomes. This doesn’t take into account Steph’s injury this year, nor his long sabbatical, so adjust your interpretation accordingly.

In case you’re curious, 538’s top 10 comparisons for Stephen Curry were

1. Chauncey Billups

2. Reggie Miller

3. Manu Ginobili

4. Kyle Lowry

5. Ray Allen

6. Kobe Bryant

7. Larry Bird

8. Dwyane Wade

9. Chris Paul

10. Jason Terry

RAPTOR has extensive detailed season by season projections for Curry, with projected Wins Above Replacement and many other measures. Here is the projection in one oversimplified graph:

Keep in mind that the error bars are large. To add their text interpretations:

• 2019-20. 12.0 = MVP Candidate

• 2020-21. 11.4 = All-Star

• 2021-22. 10.5 = All-Star

• 2022-23. 8.1 = Borderline All-Star

• 2023-24. 6.2 = Possible All-Star

• 2024-25. 4.6 = Average Starter

• 2025-26. 2.5 = Rotation Player / Scrappy Veteran

So they project that Curry will likely play at an All-Star to Borderline All-Star level for the next four years, and then an Average Starter level for his planned final year.

(2023 UPDATE) Steph beat his RAPTOR projections in 2021 and 2022 after the lost year of 2020.

RAPTOR predicted Steph would drop from MVP levels (+12.0) to merely All-Star levels (+9.5) in 2023. In fact, by RAPTOR’s own numbers, Steph was at +11.5 WAR in 2023, maintaining his MVP levels.

RAPTOR now thinks that Steph will play at a low All-Star level for the next two seasons and then drop off a cliff for the 2025-26 season to below-average starter. This last part is consistent with their projection back in 2019.

Comparison Cases: Steve Nash, Reggie Miller, Mark Price, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf and Dell Curry

The first two players are the players that Curry claims he patterned his game after, so it’s natural to look at how they did.  Steph has been compared to the next two, and of course his father’s career feels very relevant.

Steve Nash

Steve Nash had a frenetic on-ball dribble game, driving and creating shots for teammates, and shooting accurately off-the-dribble. If Curry ages anything like Steve Nash, it will be a spectacular show. For Nash’s age 29 season, he hadn’t even been traded to the Phoenix Suns yet. He turned 30 with the Dallas Mavericks during 2003-04, and was an All-Star point guard and All-NBA Third Team for the second straight year. Yet, he wasn’t MVP Nash yet, and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban lowballed a four-year offer to the (apparently) old Nash, and declined to match a six year offer from the Phoenix Suns. Nash’s skill combined with Coach Mike D’Antoni’s Seven Seconds Or Less schemes created a league terror, and Nash captured back to back MVPs in his age 30 and 31 years.  

Even though he was edged out for MVP in his age 32 year (by Dirk Nowitzki), it was in some ways his best statistical year, posting his best True Shooting Percentage (TS%), highest Win Shares, best Offensive Box Plus Minus and career-high assists per game.  Starting with 2007-08, his age 33 season, his TS% and BPM began a steady decline. He was named an All-Star in 2009-10 (age 35) and 2011-12 (age 37). But by his age 37 season, he was missing significant time due to injuries (back and leg) and wasn’t the same for his last two seasons. 

Nash lived up to the old idea that shooting ages well: from age 30 to 38, his TS% stayed above an impressive .601, easily among the league leaders. 

Reggie Miller

Reggie Miller had a relentless off-ball game, running off screens and catch-and-shooting accurately in traffic. Reggie Miller did not age quite as explosively as Nash, but he aged effectively and gracefully. In his age 29 year, 1994-95, Miller was at his peak, with his 8 points in 9 seconds coming in the 1995 Playoffs.

He had a very consistent career prime and in fact, his Game 4 game-winner in Jordan’s face came in 1998 at the age of 32.  He made the All-Star team that year, and again at the age of 34 (no small task sharing the conference with Michael Jordan and fan favorite Penny Hardaway). This was year 9 of an excellent 12-year stretch where he averaged more than 18 points per game on excellent TS%. In fact, between ages 23 and 38, Miller finished in the top 11 in the league for TS%.

Keep in mind that Miller was an unusually healthy athlete, missing very few games in his career. 

Mark Price

Mark Price was a sweet-passing, sweet-shooting, four-time-All-Star point guard for the excellent Cleveland Cavaliers team that consistently got eliminated by Michael Jordan’s Bulls. He was the second member of the 50-40-90 Club and won two 3-Point Shootouts. He was 6’ 0” and played at 170-180 lbs, so he was usually bumped all over the court as the smallest player. In 1994-95 at the age of 30, he broke his hand and missed half the season.

At the age of 31 (Steph’s current age), Price suffered a foot injury and missed practically the entire season. At the age of 32, Price played for the Warriors and shot well when he played (39.6% from three) but was hampered by a broken hand. He wound down his career at 33 with the Magic shooting 33.5%, wrestling with hand injuries.

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf

Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf has been compared to Steph Curry in his daring off-the-dribble style. He was actually smaller, at 6’ 1” and 165 lbs, but was more of a high-flyer than Curry, actually participating in the 1993 Slam Dunk Contest. His stroke was pure, as he set a record for best free-throw percentage for a season (95.6%) in 1993-94, but his 3P% was held back by the difficulty of his off-the-dribble threes.

He was Kaepernick before Kaepernick, refusing to stand for the U.S. National Anthem in 1996 in protest of “the country’s history of tyranny”. The NBA fined him and he was never quite the same after the national controversy. He was traded in 1996 from the Nuggets to the Kings, at the age of 27, and in 1998 at the age of 29, he couldn’t get offers from any NBA team.

He signed a contract with Fenerbahçe in Turkey, but quit mid-season citing burnout. He played overseas for the next six years (except a brief fling with the Vancouver Grizzlies, where at the age of 31 he played spot minutes and shot 28.6% from three), and his shooting stats are quite hard to come by. but in 2018 in the Big3, at the ripe age of 49, he shot 45.5% from three, and 36.8% at the age of 50.

Dell Curry

And just for completeness, the NBA player that is closest genetically to Stephen Curry is of course Dell Curry (actually Seth Curry also, but we have even less data on his aging than on Steph’s). Dell was a catch-and-shoot role player who brought shooting off the bench, and was a regular finalist for Sixth Man of the Year, breaking through in his age 29 year, 1993-94.

Despite irregular minutes, he shot well until his last year at age 37, including a stupendous league-leading 47.6 3P% at the age of 34. Given Dell’s lower minutes (averaging 21.7 minutes per game), it’s hard to make inferences about Stephen Curry. 

So How Will Steph Curry Age? Does Shooting Age Well?

The conventional wisdom is that shooting ages well, and at least the first three players are great examples, as you can see in the 3P% data below.

Dell Curry and Steve Nash remained dead-eye shooters until their last seasons. Reggie Miller had remained excellent with a slight overall downward trend and more inconsistency after 35. Price was derailed by injuries, and Abdul-Rauf was blackballed and also burned-out. The declines of every one of them in their very last season are likely no coincidence. Once they couldn’t fill up the basket efficiently, they knew it was time to hang it up.

(2023 UPDATE) Steph’s 3P% starting in his Age 32 season was: 42.1%, 38.0%, 42.7%, 44.2% (2023-24 on Nov 26). He seems to be shooting as well as ever and even increasing his 3PA volume.

We have no answers, just cautionary tales and hopes.

• RAPTOR places him at All-star or Borderline All-Star for the next four years.  

• Steve Nash had one of his best years at age 32, just missing MVP, so if Curry did improve upon his previous statistical bests -- hard to even fathom -- he would be the top offensive player in league history. Seems unlikely. 

  (2023 UPDATE) In fact, Steph did have a tremendous offensive year in 2020-21 — just missing MVP — followed by a slow start in 2021-22 which had people asking if he was washed before he turned in an all-time performance in the 2022 Playoffs.

• If Curry ages like Reggie Miller, then he will have a slow mild decline in his effectiveness while still being All-Star quality over the next three years. 

  (2023 UPDATE) This didn’t happen. He was great.

• If Curry ages like his father, he will be a useful spot up shooter for years to come.

  (2023 UPDATE) He was way more than that.

• If Curry ages like Mark Price, injuries will completely derail his career.

  (2023 UPDATE) So far so good.

• Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was already out of the league by Steph’s current age, and he has such an unusual story that it’s hard to compare. But it’s a tale of how burnout and stress from controversy can derail a career.

(2023 UPDATE) The RAPTOR projection system seems convinced that Steph will be very good until the 2025-26 season, his Age 38 season, at which point he’ll decline below starter level.

The case studies suggest that elite shooters remain elite in pure accuracy into old age, and it is other factors that take them out. It could be declining athleticism which makes them less playable perhaps due to not being able to get separation from defenders, or due to being a defensive liability.

Steph’s defense has improved over time in terms of strength, wisdom (big reduction of reach in fouls, remember those?) and playing within a scheme. However, it feels like he’s been making more errors off-ball in the form of backdoor cuts or letting his man spring free for catch and shoots.

Steph has been missing more and more games due to injury each season (games played starting 2017-18: 51, 69, 5, 63, 64, 56). Even if each individual injury may feel like a fluke, the trend can’t be ignored. If Steph manages the fortune of avoiding a severe injury, it still seems likely that he’ll continue to have unreliable availability for the rest of his career and at some point he’ll have to decide whether the rehab is worth it. So, enjoy every Steph play while you can!

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