Stephen Curry update: Stephen Curry is still really good.
Really, really good.
So good that he’s used the Golden State Warriors’ first eight games as his own personal plaything—a stage on which he has humiliated defenses, torched twine, made twenty-point quarters a regularity and, above all else, put the NBA’s early season MVP race in a chokehold.
The folks over at Basketball-Reference have an MVP tracker, which “ranks candidates based on a model built using previous voting results.” And as of now, Curry is owning that model.
Here’s the probabilities for the top 10 candidates as of Nov. 11:
1. Stephen Curry: 95 percent
2. Blake Griffin: 1.9 percent
3. LeBron James: 0.9 percent
4. Russell Westbrook: 0.8 percent
5. Andre Drummond: 0.4 percent
6. Kevin Durant: 0.3 percent
7. Draymond Green: 0.3 percent
8. Kevin Love: 0.2 percent
9. Paul Millsap: 0.1 percent
10. Kawhi Leonard: 0.1 percent
Holy. Freaking. Crap.
Eight games is only eight games and all that good stuff. Curry is going to slow down. It’s going to happen.
He won’t finish with more win shares than 20-plus percent of the league’s teams have actual wins. In all likelihood, he’ll soon stop flirting with averaging more points than minutes per game, something that has only ever been done by Wilt Chamberlain, according to Basketball-Reference. He mostly likely won’t continue draining more than 47 percent of his threes while, on average, jacking up more than 10 per game. He probably won’t set the league’s player efficiency rating record, as he is currently on pace to do.
Again, he is going to cool off. If anyone could stay on fire for a full 82 games, it would be him, but the odds are stacked against it. His MVP odds will, in turn, journey downward, if not outright plummet.
As for his shot at repeating as league MVP, something that has only been done by LeBron James, Michael Jordan, Steve Nash, Tim Duncan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Moses Malone during the three-point era, well, that’s for real.
Stephen Curry’s production will ebb, his historical flame-throwing cool, his grip on the MVP probability scale loosen. But, even after accounting for that natural regression, he must still be seen as what he wasn’t last season, when he actually earned MVP honors: the prohibitive favorite.
