Steph Curry Has 3-Point Shot at Stunning NBA History

It shouldn't be possible for the debate to end this early, but it is. Stephen Curry, who isn't even six full seasons into his NBA career, is already cementing himself as the greatest three-point shooter in league history.

And it really doesn't matter who you ask to settle this argument, either. Everyone is starting to come down on Curry's side.

Reigning MVP Kevin Durant anointed Curry as the top marksman last January:

Five-time All-Star and current TNT analyst Chris Webber chimed in on the subject in November and reached the same conclusion:

Even President Barack Obama offered his input during a chat with Charles Barkley last February. Obama's a Curry guy, too:

"Statistically, he is on his way to rewriting the NBA record book," The Wall Street Journal's Ben Cohen wrote of Curry. "Mechanically, he makes physicists marvel. Curry three-pointers are like everyone else's dunks: Only his misses are surprising."

Clearly, there's a strong sentiment right now to crown Curry as the greatest three-point threat the game has ever seen. But these arguments are never about feelings alone. There needs to be evidence supporting those takes.

There is plenty of it in Curry's case. And it is unlike anything hoop heads have ever seen.

Curry made his latest foray into the record books during the Golden State Warriors' 117-102 win over the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday. With his first of four triples on the night, he became the fastest player to reach 1,000 career made threes.

"It was Curry's 369th game, which is 88 fewer than it took Dennis Scott (457 games) to reach the milestone," noted Antonio Gonzalez of The Associated Press.

Curry's entire NBA story is quickly turning into tales of being the first or the fastest.

He owns two of the four most prolific perimeter shooting seasons in history, including the No. 1 spot on that list for the 272 threes he buried in 2012-13. But the quality of his marksmanship is just as impressive as the quantity. He is the only player who has made 250 threes and shot better than 43 percent from deep in the same season.

He cashed in a mind-numbing 45.3 percent of his long-range looks during that record-setting season.

There is supposed to be a trade-off between volume and efficiency. That's why there is no overlap between the league's all-time top 10 in three-point makes and three-point percentage. Those in the former averaged 1.78 made threes per game on 38.0 percent shooting. For the latter, it's 1.32 makes with a 43.3 percent conversion rate.

Curry averages 2.7 threes and shoots 43.5 percent from beyond the arc for his career.

Only 11 times in league history has a player attempted 600-plus shots from the perimeter. Curry has done it twice and hit better than 42 percent of his attempts each time. Dennis Scott and Ray Allen are the only other players who have ever cleared 40 percent with that type of volume, and neither did it more than once.

Provided Curry can avoid the injury bug, he has more than a good chance of eventually surpassing Allen's unprecedented 2,973 makes. As the chart shows below, Curry is already outpacing the league's top five leaders in made threes—Allen, Reggie Miller, Jason Terry, Jason Kidd and Paul Pierce—through the first six seasons of their respective careers.

A couple points to contextualize the fiery start to Curry's career.

Due to the lockout in 2011-12, his ankle problems that same year and the fact that this season isn't halfway over, Curry has only played 369 regular-season games. By the completion of their sixth seasons, each of the other five snipers had played at least 414 games.

And Curry has more threes now (1,003) than any of them did then. Allen was the closest at 928, and the only other one with more than 800 makes.

Allen was also the only one of the five to have made more than 40 percent of his attempts to that point (40.8 to be precise). Curry is at 43.5 percent and has never finished a season below 43.7 (though he's "only" hitting at a 39.2 percent clip in 2014-15).

Curry also isn't taking the same type of threes those players did.

He's responsible for driving the Warriors offense and making contributions from everywhere on the floor. He's still doing damage from distance (3.0 threes per game), but he's also putting up 22.9 points and 8.0 assists a night.

Golden State can't afford to run him around screens all night, hoping that the defense breaks down often enough for him to make a major impact. That means Curry has to seek out a lot of his three-point bombs on his own.

For his career, only 62.6 percent of his threes have come off assists. Since the start of last season, that number is down to 45.6. Of those five prolific shooters mentioned above, Terry created the highest percentage of his threes—only 81.5 percent were set up by his teammates.

As NBC Sports' D.J. Foster explained, there is no reliable way for a defense to take away Curry's shots:

"

Everyone knows what he wants to do. He gets every team’s best defender and the full undivided attention of defenses every night. Coaches say, 'Make him put it on the floor. Make anyone else beat us.' And then what? He pulls up from 27 feet with a hand in his face and woosh, there goes the ball through the net, and there goes your gameplan.

"

Numerically, Curry is on pace to crush the shooters standing in front of him.

Using his career rate of 2.7 threes per game, he needs 729 more games to match Allen's mark of 2,973 threes. That's approximately nine more seasons that the 26-year-old Curry would have to play. Allen, by the way, turned 39 last July and still has yet to officially hang them up. In other words, Curry playing until he's 35 isn't exactly a big reach.

Curry could also cut that time down if he stays near the volume he's been at the past few seasons. Since the start of 2012-13, he has averaged 3.3 triples a night. At that rate, he'd only need 597 games to catch Allen—or a tad more than seven seasons.

But as important as numbers are, this isn't a statistical discussion alone. Great shooters don't look great only on the stat sheet; they also stand out for their iconic shots.

Bring Miller to mind, and it won't take long to remember the eight-point barrage he dropped on the New York Knicks in nine seconds during the 1995 Eastern Conference Semifinals. Think of Allen, and you immediately see him backtracking into the corner for the miracle shot that saved the Miami Heat in the 2013 NBA Finals.

Curry hasn't experienced that moment yet. He's had game-winners, shots flashing his in-the-arena range and nights when everything he tosses up seems to come splashing down.

But he still needs to bring his magic show to the biggest stage.

The Warriors have made just two playoff runs during his tenure and only once slipped past the opening round. What followed that lone series win was a six-game lesson in championship-level execution by the San Antonio Spurs.

However, Curry could be filling our memory banks sooner rather than later.

Golden State looks ready to be the one dishing out some lessons this time around. The Warriors have the league's best winning percentage (.848) and net efficiency rating (plus-12.7 points per 100 possessions), along with an MVP-caliber marksman who likes their championship odds.

"We've had that confidence since training camp," Curry said on the possibility of making a title run, per Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News, "it's just a matter of sticking to that process and not losing focus on each game."

The Warriors have arguably the league's most complete set of championship ingredients: two-way balance, depth, intelligence, chemistry.

Oh, and the best shooter the league has ever seen. It didn't take 1,000 triples to realize that, but those splashdowns helped mark Curry's rise as the objective and subjective leader in long-distance shooting.

Unless otherwise noted, statistics used courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.

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