A funny little meme making the rounds recently shows both Stephen Curry and his brother, Seth Curry, suggesting just how bad the more famous sibling does when he and the Golden State Warriors reach the NBA Finals. More than anything, it shows just how a lot of people feel about someone with back-to-back MVPs, a bunch of three-point shooting records, and an NBA championship from 14 months ago.
Curry can have all the great regular season games he wants, and even some massive ones in the postseason. Until he wins a championship as the Finals MVP, he’ll always have this asterisk in the eyes of some when it comes to his credibility and place among the all-time greats. ESPN and others beginning to rank Curry as one of the best point guards of all-time when he has only 7 NBA seasons and only 1 and a half of them truly great annoys people, and losing to LeBron James while having a very inconsistent postseason helped turn the narrative on Curry.
Curry averaged 26 points and 6.3 assists per game in the 2015 finals, but Andre Iguodala won the finals MVP. He averaged 22.6 points and 3.7 assists per game in the 2016 Finals series. His 24.1 points per game in two NBA Finals isn’t bad, but great players are expected to take their game to another level in the Finals. Maybe Curry just falls in deeper into the team oriented system instead of doing things on his own, but when he sets a certain standard in the regular season, not living up to it in the Finals comes with a cost: Losing the championship, and everyone starting to label him in certain ways.
Comparing him to Seth Curry is funny, but not that fair. The younger Curry brother will be playing for the Dallas Mavericks next season, who liked what they saw as he averaged 6.8 points in 44 games last season with the Sacramento Kings. That’s his best since entering the league and fighting to stay in it, going undrafted in 2013. Since then he bounced around the D-League (including for the Warriors), but actually played for Memphis, Cleveland and Phoenix before a more stable gig in Sacramento. Stephen Curry was disappointing in the NBA Finals, but he wasn’t Seth Curry-bad.
