Kurtenbach: Steph Curry’s second scoring title should silence his doubters once and for all

SAN FRANCISCO — In his 20s, Stephen Curry changed the entire sport of basketball.

In his 30s, Curry is still showing the rest of the league how to play this game he changed.

At age 33, Curry just turned in the best regular season of his revolutionary career, capturing his second scoring title with a career-high 32 points per game average.

He capped it all off with one of his best performances of this incredible campaign.

Going into Sunday’s game, Curry needed only three points to claim the scoring title.

He scored 46.

And, even more importantly, those points — including three clutch 3-pointers late — proved critical in leading the Warriors to a critical win over the Memphis Grizzlies, securing the No. 8 seed in the Western Conference and an easier path through the league’s new play-in tournament in the process.

“He’s never been better,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said of Curry. “He’s been great for a long time, though — he’s been like this for years… What’s different this year is that the supporting cast is different. He’s been asked to do more with this group. He’s gone above and beyond.”

Curry is already a first-ballot Hall of Famer, a three-time champion, and the driving force behind the incredible turnaround of the Warriors’ franchise. That context is vital to understanding Curry’s greatness. His trophy cabinets are full. His legacy as an all-time great is secure. This was supposed to be on the downslope of his incredible career.

And yet in a season when he had “no help”, he still did things that only the best of the best have ever done.

Of course, he’ll still be underrated by far too many. And that’s those joyless folks’ loss. His greatness is too obvious to anyone who wants to pay attention.

Curry likely won’t be named the league’s MVP at the end of the season — that award appears to be Denver center Nikola Jokic’s — but you can’t tell me that there’s a more important player to his team in the league.

In a star-driven league, Curry remains a supernova. There has never been a player like him, and while there are already countless wannabe copycats, it’s likely that he’ll be one of a kind.

Curry is the oldest scoring champion since Michael Jordan led the league in 1997-98 at the age of 34, and he becomes one of only four players in the history of the league to win multiple MVP awards, win multiple titles, and claim multiple scoring titles.

The other names on the lost are a who’s who of basketball history: Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Yeah… not bad company.

“You can’t have a knock on him — he’s the best doing it right now,” teammate Juan Toscano-Anderson said.

Is a scoring title enough a commemorate a season like Curry’s?

It’ll likely have to stand.

Making the play-in tournament doesn’t carry much prestige, after all. But for this Warriors’ team, it’s an outstanding accomplishment. Last year, with Curry only playing four-and-a-half games, Golden State had the worst record in the NBA. They were so bad they weren’t even invited to the NBA’s end-of-season bubble in Orlando last summer.

This season, they’re above .500, in the playoffs — sort of — and showed the capability to play with and beat some of the NBA’s best teams.

Nothing is static year-over-year in the NBA, but ostensively, the only change the Warriors made between last season and this one was the re-introduction of Curry into the lineup.

And everyone who watched him this season will remember that because of that talent level around him, those 32 points per game Curry scored didn’t come easy.

Sunday’s quasi-playoff contest Sunday was a perfect encapsulation of Curry’s greatness this season. The Memphis Grizzlies threw everything at Curry in the early portion of the game, knowing that if they could stop Curry, they’d stop the Warriors. One of the NBA’s most underrated on-ball defenders, Dillion Brooks, drew Curry duty early and kept the Warriors’ guard stymied. But one man cannot keep Curry down for long. Brooks’ exhaustion from chasing around Curry became evident after only a few minutes, leading the Grizzlies to start throwing double and triple-teams on No. 30. The Baby Faced Assassin quickly exploited that overwhelming defensive attention with pinpoint passing and broke through them with his superhuman omnidirectional body control.

Suddenly everything broke down for Memphis and Curry broke through.

How many times did we see that this year?

It didn’t matter what you threw at Curry this season, he was going to find a way to make the winning play, and so often that meant him putting the ball through the basket. The basketball god of 3-point variance, some metal bleachers in Houston, and some tricky road rims were the only forces capable of slowing down Curry this season.

Even then, they didn’t slow him down much.

Curry’s scoring flurries always come fast and furious. But this year, with a full defense on top of him, at times, a couple of his teammates, too, he was still exceptionally lethal and efficient.

And that’s made this season so incredible for Curry. It wasn’t just the impressive volume of Curry’s scoring — it was how easy he made the exceptionally challenging look.

Distance allows for perspective, and while we all acknowledge the greatness of Curry at this moment, I seriously doubt that we fully appreciate his exalted place in the history of the game at this moment.

Of course, Curry’s legacy is still being written. And if we’ve learned anything from this incredible campaign, it’s that nothing is out of the question for Curry in the future.