Stephen Curry 'Frustrated' Referees Still Aren't Putting Him on Free-Throw Line
Apparently, Chef Curry brought the pot with him to the Big Apple, and he's not afraid to stir it.
And, when it comes to not getting the respect from referees that an NBA superstar might otherwise expect, Stephen Curry may have a point.
"I haven't gotten a lot of calls, but I don't expect them to come," Curry said during All-Star media day (via CSNBayArea.com's Monte Poole). "If you go into the game expecting to get foul calls from the refs, then that's going to influence your game and you're at a disadvantage. You have to find a way to do it yourself.
"I get frustrated sometimes, though, because it's annoying. But I find if I get frustrated to a point where it distracts from what we're trying to do as a team, that's where I'm doing us a disservice."
His frustration has boiled over before. In last year's playoff series against the Los Angeles Clippers, Curry earned a technical foul for tossing away his mouthguard, after failing to draw a foul (or even contact, really) from Blake Griffin.
Granted, calls like the one below are liable to stoke that fire of Curry's—or anyone else's in a similar position, for that matter.
Curry hasn't had any trouble scoring without the help of those in zebra stripes this season. The Golden State Warriors' two-time All-Star ranks seventh in the league in points (23.6) and is tied for first in three-point makes (161) with Atlanta's Kyle Korver and Portland's Wesley Matthews, both of whom he'll face during Saturday's Three-Point Contest in Brooklyn.
Curry's penchant for perimeter shooting may have something to do with the lack of attention from officials. While he leads the league in three-point attempts at eight per game, Curry doesn't even register in the top 75 among his peers when it comes to attempting close-range shots, per NBA.com. The league's SportVU stats also peg Curry as just the 43rd-most-frequent driver, with six drives per game this season.
To his credit, though, Curry has become a more frequent visitor to the restricted area in 2014-15. According to Basketball Reference, Curry has taken a career-high 19.7 percent of his shots from within three feet of the basket—up significantly from 13.9 percent last season.
Just because Curry can't be found inside as often as some other studs doesn't mean he hasn't put himself in harm's way enough to earn more whistles than he has thus far. As Poole explained:
"It's not that Curry avoids contact. At 6-foot-3, 185 pounds, he's the primary ball-handler for the Warriors, frequently venturing into the thicket of bodies in the paint to loft floaters off the glass or feathery scoops. It's not uncommon for him to get knocked to the ground, sometimes in front of an official, without a whistle.
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Moreover, Curry's emergence as a superstar scorer with a lightning-quick trigger has drawn defenders closer to him than ever before and made constant contact something with which he has to cope.
"People try to get physical, try to take my strengths away, take my freedom of movement away, so that they can stay as connected as possible, whether it's grabbing or holding or something else," Curry went on. "Some guys are subtle with it, and some guys are over the top with it.
"They don't want to give me an inch. If it gets way over the top, you hope the refs make the adjustment, but you can't go in expecting that because then you'll be off your game and they'll win."
In the refs' defense, Curry has seen an uptick in his trips to the stripe. His free-throw rate (.264 free-throw attempts per field-goal attempt, according to Basketball Reference), while not astronomical, still represents a career high for the Davidson product. So, too, do his 4.5 freebie tries per game—a top-40 mark.
But even that number pales in comparison to the frequency with which Curry's fellow MVP favorites get to the stripe:
| Stephen Curry | 6.0 | .197 | .264 | 4.5 |
| James Harden | 10.6 | .311 | .508 | 9.3 |
| LeBron James | 9.7 | .337 | .437 | 8.2 |
| Russell Westbrook | 9.2 | .348 | .429 | 8.7 |
| Anthony Davis | 1.4 | .383 | .389 | 6.7 |
As former NBA referee Bob Delaney told Bleacher Report during the 2013 NBA Finals, the notion that superstars do or should get more calls because of their stature just doesn't add up:
"People talk about superstar calls.
I would like to bring folks out onto an NBA floor and ask them to referee a period, and when you’re refereeing that ballgame, you’re going to have to know all the rules. You’re going to have to observe, process, evaluate, make decisions over and over and over again, and then you’re going to tell me that I can determine which player I’m going to call certain things on and that I’m not going to call others on?
I thank you for thinking that I’m that good, but I’m not.
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Curry, on the other hand, is that good, and may well hear a few more whistles in his favor after the All-Star break now that he's drawn attention to the issue.
Josh Martin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter.
