Coach K doesn’t buy the idea that Stephen Curry’s hurting the game
Three months ago, one of Stephen Curry’s former coaches made national headlines by claiming that the NBA’s reigning Most Valuable Player was hurting the game. This week, another of the Golden State Warriors superstar’s former coaches offered a dissenting opinion.
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Here’s how Duke head coach Mike Krzyzewski, who coached Curry on the versions of the U.S. men’s national basketball team that won gold at the 2010 FIBA World Championship and the 2014 FIBA World Cup, responded to a question about Curry during his media session prior to Duke’s Sweet 16 matchup with Oregon, as transcribed by ASAP Sports:
Q. In an era where all kids love Steph Curry, how do you remind your guys to not necessarily play like Steph Curry?
MIKE KRZYZEWSKI: No, I’d like them to play like — I’ve coached Steph twice, and if they can play like that, that would be cool, man. It would be a lot better.
I think Steph is a great example of preparation and consistent preparation and love of the game. You see it manifested in his talents and what he does. But the preparation that he has and the attitude that he has on a day-to-day basis to do his best are amazing examples for kids. I think he’s an amazing example for constant improvement, constant love of the game, constant hunger to show that he can do it again, never satisfied, all those things are alive and well with Steph Curry. Those are great examples for our guys to watch. So we like when they watch him.
Since Dec. 25, 2015, now seems like 100 million years ago, let’s revisit what former Warriors coach Mark Jackson said about Curry during ABC’s broadcast of the marquee Christmas Day matchup between Golden State and the Cleveland Cavaliers:
“Steph Curry’s great,” Jackson said. “Steph Curry’s the MVP. He’s a champion. Understand what I’m saying when I say this. To a degree, he’s hurt the game. And what I mean by that is I go into these high school gyms, I watch these kids, and the first thing they do is run to the 3-point line. You are not Steph Curry. Work on the other aspects of your game. People think that he’s just a knock-down shooter. That’s not why he’s the MVP. He’s a complete basketball player.”
“People are not looking at that. That didn’t filter down when we had Michael Jordan. It didn’t filter down when you saw Kobe Bryant’s incredible all-time great footwork. We don’t fall in love with the things that make ‘em great. We fall in the love with things that they do great.”
“I have to talk to him,” Curry told Yahoo Sports after getting wind of Jackson’s remarks. “I don’t know what he means by that. If you can shoot, shoot. If you can’t, stop.”
Curry later gave his former coach the benefit of the doubt, telling reporters that he believed Jackson misspoke and that “there was a compliment in there”:
“After I heard all of what he was talking about, I understand where he’s coming from – that being for the youth of today and how they watch us play or watch me in particular, and they want to go out and try to do the same thing,” Curry said Saturday. “It’s all about practice and routine and repetition that can help you get to that point, so you can’t skip that part of the process.
“I wish he would have phrased it just a little bit differently. I think I’m trying to inspire people to see the game differently in a positive way.”
That’s how fellow Warrior and former Jackson charge Draymond Green sees it, too — that watching the 6-foot-3, 185-pound Curry dominate a game that’s long been the province of either skyscraping giants or unfathomable athletic specimens puts young basketball lovers in the position of imagining themselves accomplishing the same goals if they work hard enough.
“It’s good for kids to think they can be Steph because it gives them realistic hope,” Green told Yahoo Sports.
The chatter about Curry ruining the game has long since died down, overwhelmed by seemingly ceaseless praise for his play as he continues shattering 3-point records, leads the league in scoring, and paces Golden State’s push for the best record in NBA history. But just because it’s no longer the dominant storyline, that doesn’t mean it’s not still there, with folks bemoaning how 10-year-olds refuse to work on the fundamentals because they’d rather just fling 35-footers because that’s what Steph does.
Except, of course, that’s not what Steph does. (Well, not entirely.) Yes, Steph bombs away from further out and under adverse conditions more frequently and with greater accuracy than any player in basketball history, but as Coach K noted during an October 2015 interview with ACCDN’s Jeff Fischel that touched on the growth in Curry’s game between his 2010 and 2014 stints with Team USA, that isn’t the (only) thing that makes him special:
His ability to get his shot off, he worked on it so much. What he does, all that ball-handling, that’s cool, whatever, that’s what people see. But what they don’t see is, he knows he’s going to be guarded by probably the best perimeter athlete on the other team, who will probably be, overall, a better athlete than him — maybe a little bit quicker, stronger, bigger. He’s not just going to blow by somebody, and so he has a space, and in that space, stuff that he would do would have to be a little bit unconventional, because he has such a quick release to create windows of opportunity to shoot.
How he works on those things — they’re not conventional ball-handling, but they’re balanced and they create windows, and it’s remarkable to see him work on that, and that it comes natural, just like a great dancer or whatever. ‘Oh, I can do that.’ Well, no, you can’t do that.
And if anyone can appreciate the development work that Curry has put into developing the other facets of his game — his physical fitness, his core strength, his ball-handling ability, his motion with and without the ball, his passing, etc. — it’s Krzyzewski, who’s been saying mea culpa about Steph for years. From a 2010 New York Times story by Pete Thamel:
Of all the coaches who overlooked Stephen Curry as a young player, Mike Krzyzewski acknowledges that his missed evaluation may be the most glaring. Curry attended Duke’s basketball camp as a youngster, making Krzyzewski and his staff among the first who labeled Curry as too short, too thin and too one-dimensional.
And from a 2014 story by Rick Bonnell of the Charlotte Observer:
Earlier in the day, during USA Basketball’s conference call to discuss the player pool, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski acknowledged how badly he underestimated Curry’s potential out of high school.
“If I was smart I would have (coached) Stephen a long time ago,” said Krzyzewski, who will again be men’s Team USA coach.
Every coach misjudges a recruit or a prospect at some point along the line, and Coach K was far from the first one to look past Dell Curry’s spindly son. Now, though, that miscue has given him an even greater appreciation of everything that Curry’s game encompasses, and everything that went into building Steph into the best and most potent basketball player in the world — including countless hours spent focusing on stuff that’s got nothing to do with the flick of the wrist that every coach at every level can hold up as an example for the young players under his wing.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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