Video Emerges of a Young Stephen Curry Balling Out in Middle School

His release is the same, and the crossover is its usual, ankle-crippling self.

Yeah, old video of a tweenage Stephen Curry ripping apart a middle school basketball game looks spookily similar to his highlight tapes at age 26.

Ahead of Friday's game between the Golden State Warriors and Toronto Raptors, the Toronto Star’s Alex Ballingall published a piece on Curry and his brief stint in Toronto as a youngster. Prior to attending high school in North Carolina, Curry enrolled at Queensway Christian College in Toronto for his final year of middle school.

There, Curry joined the school's floundering basketball team and effectively took over the region, turning the program from a small-school afterthought into a local powerhouse single-handedly.

Embedded in Ballingall's piece is a video owned by then-Queensway basketball coach James Lackey, who recorded a friendly scrimmage between Curry and his teammates. His father, former Raptor shooting guard Dell Curry, also suited up for the game, presumably to keep his son from running completely roughshod over his peers.

"He was this tiny little guy, but when we put him on the court he was just unbelievable," Lackey told Ballingall. "He was scoring 40 points, 50 points a game, no problem. No one even came close to us that year."

When your squad looks like this, is losing even possible?

As for the scrimmage, Dell intercepts his son on an errant pass, but other than that, it's mostly a dominant highlight reel for Stephen. He rains triples, dribble-drives and even tosses a coy behind-the-back pass to one teammate who wants nothing to do with interrupting the Stephen Curry Show.

As a former glue guy, I understand this impulse. We all had our go-to scorers in middle school and high school, and the smart ones among us knew to get them the ball, get out of the way and rush in for the possibility of the rebound.

I was all about the hustle rebound. Get low, box out, use your backside and elbows—booty-bows.

The booty-bows are essential non-scorer tools, and watching this video makes me feel slightly sad for Curry's eighth-grade glue guys, who probably stopped fighting for position after his seventh three-ball swished through the net.

Sigh. Don't worry, hustle-kids. Your grit does not unappreciated.

Dan is on Twitter, boxing out all talk of the dress.