Perennial All-Star, Stephen Curry seeks his second three-point contest title
Perennial All-Star, Stephen Curry seeks his second three-point contest title
The face of Golden State's empire features heavily in a day of stars - opening with the three-point contest, before starting alongside a star-stuffed team LeBron
Update (5:15pm). Steph wins on the last shot.
Slightly more coverage at https://www.letsgowarriors.com/p/all-star-game-thread-stephen-curry
Original Preview
Today’s All-Star union with LeBron James, may be the most important game of Stephen Curry’s career.
LOL. Just kidding.
It’s meaningless, but if you have a little room in your life for some meaningless - but hopefully fun - basketball in your life, the NBA All-Star game is on this afternoon. It’s a compressed format this year, with Curry’s seventh appearance in the three-point contest taking place prior to the game, along with the skills competition. The Slam Dunk Contest will be at halftime.
Highlighting the stakes today, and in keeping with the NBA’s season amid a viral outbreak, we’ve got two scratches today - apparently due to their personal barber.
GAME DETAILS
WHO: All-Star team vs. All-Star team
WHEN: Sunday March 7th, 2021 // 3:30pm PDT
WATCH: TNT
Stephen Curry, brother of Splash, first of his name
Stephen Curry set a new record for three-pointers made, when he hit 272 of them in the 2012-13 season. The svelte, younger version of Curry then proceeded to break his own record in the two consecutive seasons following. Curry is just 309 made threes away from eclipsing Ray Allen for the all-time crown, a feat that should occur sometime next season.
His success in the NBA’s three-point contest has been much more mixed. Despite his accuracy (43% on his career, 41% on threes this season), Curry only came away with a win once in six attempts; but it was an epic win.
Curry went nuts, showing the reliability that is at the core of his excellence. Slipping in 13-straight makes, it was the second longest streak of made shots in the history of the contest, on his way to final round score of 27 - which set a new record (since broken) for the highest single round total.
This year, he’ll have to defeat Jaylen Brown, Jayson Tatum, Zach LaVine, Donovan Mitchell, and Mike Conley (who is replacing “injured” Devin Booker) - a very beatable field.
A humble suggestion
The first even of the day, the NBA skills competition needs a boost. The current group includes Chris Paul, Robert Covington, Julius Randle, Domantas Sabonis, Nikola Vucevic and Luka Doncic. But personally, I get absolutely zero joy from watching these professional athletes dribble, pass, and shoot. There’s no real intrigue in watching two dudes run what is essentially a practice drill.
Consider though: what if it was a real obstacle course?
Ride a bicycle with no hands while dribbling two basketballs.
Or like, make a layup blindfolded, dribble increasingly small items through that obstacle course, they start with a basketball, then are handed a tennis ball, and finally the players would have to do something tiny, like a bouncy ball.
But no. Instead we get the cardboard taste of the unimaginative.
The Game itself
As mentioned above, both teams are one man short, with both Simmons and Embiid held out for precautionary reasons associated with contact tracing.
We’ve got five first-timers this year: Conley, LaVine, Julius Randle, Jaylen Brown, and Zion Williamson, the first All-Star born in the 2000s.
Personally, it looks to me like LeGM assembled the superior team, but we’ll see this afternoon, won’t we?
Post-game thread up now. https://www.letsgowarriors.com/p/all-star-game-thread-stephen-curry
Giannis wins the MVP. Congrats. Here's his stats:
35 points 16/16 FGs 3/3 threes
7 rebounds (3 off.) 3 assists 3 turnovers 1 steal 1 block