Steph Curry’s the best shooter ever but he can get even better

There is at least one person on the planet who thinks Stephen Curry can get better. His name happens to be Stephen Curry.

Golden State superstar Stephen Curry

There is at least one person on this planet who thinks Stephen Curry can improve his shooting. His name happens to be Stephen Curry.

“I might be delusional,” he said. “But I feel like I can get better at putting the ball in the basket.”

Stephen Curry is pretty good at putting the ball in the basket. To be more specific, he is the single best shooter ever to play basketball, someone whose shooting ability birthed an NBA dynasty and changed a sport forever. But it’s not impossible for him to become a better shooter. In fact he’s done it before.

One of the many records that Curry established in his magical 2016 season was the highest true-shooting percentage of all time. It was a record that seemed likely to endure for ages. And then he shattered it last season.

Now the most efficient scorer in the history of the sport is trying to be more efficient.

It would be easy to dismiss his goal as unrealistic and maybe even irrational. This is Stephen Curry! “What else is he supposed to do?” one Golden State Warriors official said. He was the back-to-back NBA most valuable player, the engine of a team that has won three of the last four titles, the guy with such a compelling game that for a brief period of time it wasn’t entirely blasphemous to believe he was superior to LeBron James.

The problem is that the arc of a player’s career follows the same parabola as Curry’s shots. He’s now 30 years old and entering his 10th season in the NBA, and everything we know about the ageing curve suggests he’s already peaked.

But what if he’s not delusional? And what if he really is still getting better?

That’s a fantastical notion for anyone who remembers 2016. When asked last year if Curry was peaking, Draymond Green scrunched his face and might as well have rolled his eyes into the San Francisco Bay. “I’ve seen him do way more,” he said. “Peaking? That’s just ridiculous.”

Except maybe it’s not. Brandon Payne, his trusted personal trainer, also believes it’s ridiculous to believe Curry has peaked.

“He’s not even close,” Payne said. “That talk for him is very, very premature. It’s not even in our thought process.”

The thought they are processing is enough to make other NBA teams whimper. “Everything that I do great right now,” Curry said, “I want to do even better.” After one recent Warriors practice, he rattled off skills that he can upgrade like they were groceries for dinner that night: his shooting, his passing, his overall decision-making.

“As I get older,” Curry said, “the more efficient you can be with how you get your shots, how you create space, knowing where to be defensively, you prolong your career at your peak.”

He added: “If I’m not at my peak, I’m right there in terms of how much better I can get, and I want to stay there.”

The idea of flattening a peak into a plateau is becoming popular as modern technology, scientific advances and insights from bigger and better data make it possible for today’s athletes like Tom Brady in football, Roger Federer in tennis and Diana Taurasi in the WNBA to stretch their careers.

But no one is resisting his age as defiantly as LeBron James. He’s no longer the sheer force of nature that he was five years ago, but he may be a better overall player. He’s more efficient. As improbable as it seems, the prospect of Curry somehow improving at this stage of his career didn’t seem plausible last year, either.

Curry’s peak was basketball’s Mount Everest. He didn’t break the existing records for 3-pointers so much as he smashed them to bits. He took 31 per cent more threes than anyone before him in 2016, more threes by himself than entire teams had taken in recent memory, and he still managed to make enough of those low-percentage shots that he was the NBA leader in volume and efficiency.

There are two reasons that will never happen again. The first is named Kevin Durant. He’s why Curry doesn’t have to. The second is that he doesn’t want to.

“It’s not bigger numbers,” said Warriors assistant coach Bruce Fraser. “It’s better efficiency.”

Curry’s true-shooting percentage, a statistic that weighs free throws, field goals and 3-pointers to calculate scoring efficiency, is one of the metrics that illuminates his unlikely improvement. His performance in 2016 was peerless: There are thousands of scorers who have averaged 20 points in an NBA season, and Curry’s true shooting of 66.9 per cent ranked No 1.

At least until last year. That’s when Curry’s true shooting was 67.5 per cent. But the more amazing thing about his most recent shredding of the record books is that it went mostly overlooked. His team was about as exciting as porridge.

Curry missed a huge chunk of the season with injuries, and even when he was on the court, he didn’t score in very Curry ways. His numbers around the basket and behind the 3-point line were phenomenal for anyone else and pedestrian for him.

The only way he could increase his efficiency was to quietly tweak his style of play.

Curry is especially devastating off screens, for example, and now he’s scoring like that more often. His share of isolation plays dropped over the past four years, and his proportion of plays off screens doubled.

The latest evolution in his game is how often Curry is guaranteeing himself open shots. They are otherwise known as free throws.

Foul shots are less flashy but no less effective than layups and threes. There was an obvious incentive for Curry to shoot more of them. And so he did. Before last season, he took only 25 per cent as many foul shots as field-goal attempts. Last year, it spiked to 35 per cent.

That may not sound like much, but for a player who can only make tiny improvements on the margins, it was enormous. The subtle uptick was the equivalent of shooting another wide-open 3-pointer every game.

Curry trained for three hours a day and six days a week this summer. He began his workouts in a virtual-reality headset to sharpen his peripheral awareness. He proceeded to elaborate breathing exercises that stabilised his core muscles. When he finally bothered reaching for a basketball, Curry made between 600 and 700 shots in every session, Payne said. On heavy shooting days, he counted more than 1000 makes.

The whole point of his quest for peak efficiency, Curry explained, is to reach the next phase of a career that has already been revolutionary.

“Where you really have total control of your game,” he said. “You understand everything, how it’s going to happen, one step ahead.”