The 2021-22 Golden State Warriors season-in-review: Steph Curry
Curry's regular-season slump and shooting woes, his evolving shot chart, his much-improved defense, and a Finals run for the ages
Steph Curry’s grade: A
Steph Curry’s regular season:
In a press conference immediately after the Warriors’ loss to the Memphis Grizzlies in the 2021 play-in tournament, Steph Curry reflected on a bittersweet MVP-caliber season and predicted that the Warriors would return the following season in victorious fashion:
Curry’s transcendent play in the 2020-21 season echoed, and at times, surpassed the heights he reached in his unanimous MVP 2015-16 season, Curry suffered a hairline fracture to his tailbone that force him to miss 7 games, but in the 22 games after his return, he averaged 36.9 points, 5.7 rebounds, and 5 assists a game on 49/44//90 shooting splits while taking 15 threes a game. In the final 20 games of the season, the Warriors clawed their way back into the playoff race and went 15-5 with what effectively amounted to an 8-man rotation of Curry, Kent Bazemore, Andrew Wiggins, Draymond Green, Kevon Looney, Jordan Poole, and Juan Toscano-Anderson.
If Curry could play up to that level on a mediocre team, why wouldn’t he be able to deliver an MVP-caliber season for next season’s Warriors? The general consensus in NBA media was that the Warriors needed Curry to play at an MVP level to contend. The Athletic's John Hollinger, for example, foretold gloom:
A healthy Curry playing at an MVP level might get this team to a mid-tier playoff seed; anything short of that, and it’s back to the Play-In Tournament.
Hollinger’s dooming did not come to pass, at least not entirely. The Warriors finished the season in the third seed of the Western Conference despite Steph Curry missing nearly 20 games and shooting 36% from three after breaking the NBA’s all-time record in made three-pointers. Curry was disturbingly human for much of the 2021-22 regular season until he got hurt and didn’t play again until the playoffs.
What made Curry’s multi-month brush with mortality especially bizarre was that his early-season performances pushed him to the front of the MVP race. Before Curry broke the all-time three-point record, he averaged 27 points, 5.6 rebounds, 6.3 assists, 1.7 steals, and 0.5 blocks on 43/40/93 shooting splits. In those 27 games, the Warriors went 22-5 and Curry shot over 13 threes a game with four games with 40+ points, including a 50-point night against the Atlanta Hawks. You can see highlights from that game below:
My favorite early-season Curry game was a 33-point night against a Los Angeles Clippers team led by head coach, Ty Lue, that matched up well with the Warriors in recent years. Early on in the game, Curry, whose early-season defense received well-earned kudos, got dragged into the Clippers’ actions and held up well. This play against Paul George is one such example:
But of course, the legendary sequence from that game was an offensive explosion from a livid Curry shortly after he got clobbered in transition and did not receive a foul, which made him as angry as you’ll ever see him:
Curry proceeded to hit three straight shots from deep that basically put the game out of reach. The final one of these shots was flagrantly disrespectful not only towards the Clippers’ defenders but the official that Curry mocked when he made a “T” signal with his hands after the shot:
Let’s jump forward to mid-December, by which point Curry was about to break Ray Allen’s for the most made threes in NBA history. On December 7, Steph Curry was only 16 threes short of the record with a game coming up against a defensively challenged Portland Trail Blazers team. In a radio interview with 95.7 The Game, Steve Kerr was asked about the outlandish possibility that Curry could simultaneously break the single-game record for threes and Allen’s record if he got hot against the Blazers. Here’s Kerr:
“I actually considered that last night, [...] I thought about it because I’m driving home and I’m thinking ‘Alright if Steph actually did that and made like 15 threes that means he’s got about 45 points minimum and we’re probably winning by a healthy margin I’m guessing. That would make me the villain if I take him out. And yet if I don’t take him out, I’m a complete fool because he could get hurt. It’s pretty much a lose-lose for me.”
In the first half of that game, Curry hunted shots and went just 2/12 from three. In the second half, Curry was more restrained and only took five threes and made just two of them. That game, unfortunately, set the tone for the next two months — the next game, he shot 3/14 from deep in a loss to the Philadelphia 76ers, and two nights later, he went 5/15 from deep against the Indiana Pacers. Curry’s shooting struggles against the Pacers had NBCS Bay Area announcers Bob Fitzgerald and Kelenna Azubuike musing that perhaps, Curry would prefer the pomp and circumstance of breaking Ray Allen’s record in Madison Square Garden, which is exactly what happened the very next night on this shot:
Curry finished that game with 22 points and just 5/14 shooting from deep — the most memorable part of that night, at least for me, was watching Steph take in the gravity (hehe) of that moment when the Knicks showed a remarkable level of grace and immediately took a timeout so he could celebrate with his family.
From that game on, Curry’s great moments came few and far in between and often felt more like a relief than cause for celebration. That wasn’t evident right away though. Only a few nights later, Steph Curry looked like Steph fucking Curry when he put up 46 points on 8/14 shooting from deep in a close victory against the Memphis Grizzlies, and in the next game, Curry had 33 points in a Christmas day win against the Phoenix where he shot only 5/16 from deep. But from the record-breaking game until the end of February, Curry shot below 35% from three in nearly half of his games and only shot above 40% from deep in 8 games, which is as many times as he shot below 30% on threes.
The return of Klay Thompson in early January was an emotional lift to the Warriors, but Curry’s cold streak persisted and team-wide frustrations seemed to peak a few games later during an overtime loss to a short-handed Indiana Pacers team. On this night, Curry actually had 39 points on 12/27 shooting from the field and a 6/16 clip from three, but he made a brutal blunder in the final possession of regulation and lost track of Justin Holiday, who inbounded the ball for the Pacers and let him shake free for the game-tying three.
In the next game, Curry shot 6/21 from the field and 4/13 from three before hitting a buzzer-beating jumper to beat a lowly Houston Rockets team. That shot recalled a George W. Bush-ism about “the soft bigotry of low expectations” — the Warriors shouldn’t have needed Steph Curry’s heroics to win, but damn did it feel good! Curry proceeded to follow up that game with 13 and 18-point clunkers in wins against the Utah Jazz and Dallas Mavericks.
During this slump, several Twitter users pointed out that Steph seemed to be hesitating, shuffling, or stumbling before some of his shots from deep that inevitably missed. I compiled some video of those misses — as well as some uncharacteristic airballs — that date from the Indiana game preceding the record-breaking night all the way to late February. You can see those clips below:
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