Is Stephen Curry Overrated?

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Our friends (yes, we consider them friends) over at Rush the Court had a great article on Sunday poring over and breaking down Steph Curry's numbers over the last two-and-a-half seasons. They came up with these numbers:

The first chart shows Curry's career numbers against four different levels of competition. Notice the drop off against the BCS+Gonzaga.


This chart shows his performance against the BCS+Gonzaga in a year-by-year breakdown.


This is how they interpreted the numbers:

Although Curry is still able to get his against quality competition (25.7 PPG in BCS + Gonzaga compared to 24.2 PPG versus all other teams), he becomes significantly less efficient in doing so. His field goal percentage drops from 49.1 percent against non-BCS competition to 40.4 percent against BCS-level competition. The numbers become even more interesting when you look at Stephen’s numbers year-by-year against BCS-level competition.

While Stephen has been able to continue to increase his scoring against BCS-level teams each year, his field goal percentage has dropped precipitously this year. This could merely be the result of a couple of off shooting nights (even MJ had his bad games), but it is more likely related to the increased load being placed on Curry as the team’s new point guard with the departure of Jason Richards, who led the nation in assists per game last year. However, despite having Richards shouldering the ball-handling load last year, Curry’s shooting percentage was significantly lower in BCS games than it was in his games against non-BCS games.

What does all this mean? Aside from the obvious, that BCS teams are better than non-BCS teams, it raises the interesting (and controversial) argument that Stephen Curry may not be good as the hype suggests. He is certainly capable of putting up big numbers, but so were many other great college players who never were able to translate their game to the NBA.

Now if you read this blog, you know we enjoy stats and number crunching, but only to a certain extent. We've said this before, but at some point you need to actually watch the games and the players to see what is really happening.

Back to the point: I don't want to say the guys at RTC are wrong for questioning Curry, but, well, maybe I am. Hear me out.

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