An electric performance at Madison Square Garden changed the life of Stephen Curry and the future of the entire NBA. Read an excerpt from bzcohen's book, 'The Hot Hand'
Photo-Illustration: Stevie Remsberg There is nowhere the world’s most talented basketball players would rather play basketball than Madison Square Garden, which has been the site of so many divine individual performances that it’s amazing it also happens to be the home court of the New York Knicks. But for all those majestic feats in the long history of the game’s most hallowed arena, there were always three games that stood apart.
This was the unusual and highly unlikely beginning of an electric performance that would change the life of Stephen Curry and the future of the entire NBA. It was a game when the best shooter in the history of basketball had the hot hand. The problem was that Curry’s weapon was the slingshot of basketball. There was an obvious reward for anyone who could wield it: his shots were worth three points instead of two. And not since a biblical shepherd boy named David had the slingshot been used to such a devastating effect. But the slingshot wasn’t a bazooka. He still had to be selective about when he shot, where he shot, and why he shot. He couldn’t shoot too early in the twenty-four-second shot clock.
But maybe the most riveting thing that Wang and his team found was actually something they didn’t find: There is no way to predict when someone is on the verge of such a streak. “Your hot streak can come at any time,” Wang says. “What I learned from my own research is actually rather uplifting. Because the hot streak can start with any work, the only sure way to prevent it is to stop publishing. If you keep going, your hot streak may be yet to come.
That night in the Garden was not Curry’s first experience with flammability. The first that others remember was when he was six years old and played for a team that was actually called the Flames. But the first that he remembers was in the eighth grade. The Currys had moved to Canada, and Stephen and his younger brother, Seth, enrolled at Queensway Christian College. “We were a small little Christian school where everyone who tried out made the team,” says their coach James Lackey.
But there was something they could do: not let him shoot. The Knicks sent double-teams at Curry. They trapped him whenever he touched the ball. Their goal was no longer to beat the Warriors. The only thing they cared about was not letting Curry shoot.
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