By now, Steph Curry highlights are sort of redundant. His very way of playing is a highlight reel: he uses darting dribble moves to create space to launch bombs from insane distances; he plays high-stakes, gambling defense; nearly every pass he throws is a slick no-look job. That’s how you turn a relatively unexceptional athlete into one of the very best basketball players in human history—by using every possible trick to wring every possible opportunity out of every possible moment. We’ve watched him do it for the better part of a decade, now—if I told you Steph Curry scored 45 points on 21 shots in 30 minutes in an NBA game, your likely response will be something like, “again?”
So, yes, Steph scored 45 points on 21 shots in 30 minutes Saturday afternoon. It was an incredible display of basketball mastery, but it was also an infuriatingly typical Steph performance:
Steph is a goddamn force of nature. He makes this crazy-ass stuff look so easy. At about the 2:00 mark of the video he uses a quick inside-out dribble to stride into a super-quick 28-foot jumper, in semi-transition. If Bradley Beal made that play in an NBA game, it would be one of his eight or 10 best highlights of the season; Steph does that shit five to eight times a game. You have to be a really amazing player to make amazing plays look boring.