5 Reasons Stephen Curry Is Criminally Underrated
Monday night against the Phoenix Suns, Stephen Curry put up 36 points, six rebounds, five assists and four steals in a road victory that gave his team its 50th win of the season. It was an impressive stat line to be sure, but not his best of the season and not even the best stat line of the night.
Why then, was Monday night’s win for the Golden State Warriors such an eye-opening event that would lead me to create such an outlandish headline?
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Well, aside from being able to observe Steph Curry in person for the first time, it became blatantly obvious just how criminally underrated he is.
It seems ludicrous to make a statement like that about one of the NBA’s top MVP candidates, a guy who just so happens to be averaging 23.8 points, 7.7 assists, 4.4 rebounds and 2.1 steals per game while flirting with joining the 50-40-90 club. But even his status as quite possibly the league’s best point guard and most enjoyable heat check doesn’t quite do him justice.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for the Suns, who traded the face of the franchise in Goran Dragic and handed the reins over to Eric Bledsoe. With the team floundering and in clear need of leadership, Curry’s dominant 25-point second half served as a painful reminder to everyone in the building that not every franchise is lucky enough to have a star player capable of putting his team on his back.
To be honest, watching Curry go to work was probably one of the most enjoyable aspects of the 98-80 rout for Suns fans. With each jaw-dropping three-point bomb, the US Airways Center crowd swayed closer and closer to cheering for him out of sheer respect for the high level of basketball on display.
Players like that in the NBA are rare, and when someone of that caliber has grown men in media row sitting there with eyes popping out of their skulls like five-year-olds hearing their parents swear for the first time, you know you’re witnessing something special.
Steph Curry isn’t just a great basketball player who generates a lot of highlight reel plays. He’s an NBA deity whose MVP argument of “best player on the league’s best team” criminally underscores all that he brings to the table for his team and for the league in general.
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