Stephen Curry and Anthony Davis Are Perfect Next-Generation Rivals
Who better to lead the NBA into an era of positionless basketball than a point guard with the surest shot in league history and a near 7-footer with perimeter skills?
Stephen Curry and Anthony Davis are trend-setting talents, skilled to the point of redefining the expectations of and possibilities for players at their positions. They're also two of the headliners for opening night of the 2015-16 campaign, respectively leading the Golden State Warriors and New Orleans Pelicans into their Tuesday tilt (10:30 p.m. ET on TNT).
Their last head-to-head bout lacked substantive drama, as the Dubs swept the Pels in last season's opening round of the playoffs. Three of the four contests were decided by seven-plus points, but the exception was an instant classic. It featured a 20-point fourth-quarter comeback, overtime, 29 points and 15 rebounds from Davis and Curry's 40 points, three of which came on an impossible shot during the final seconds of regulation.
That was the highlight of the series. Otherwise, the proceedings played out like most meetings between No. 1 and No. 8 seeds—save for the video game-like stats Davis left in the box score each night: He averaged 31.5 points on 54 percent shooting with 11 rebounds and three blocks.
But what the contests lacked in surprise, they more than compensated for in significance. Golden State used the four games as a launching pad to snap a 40-year championship drought. New Orleans reassessed after the loss, axed then-skipper Monty Williams and handed the coaching reigns to Alvin Gentry, the offensive architect of the Warriors' title team.
Hoop heads, however, saw the series as something else: the first of potentially several postseason battles between two of the game's brightest stars.
No one had a better 2014-15 than Curry. He piloted Golden State to a league-leading (and franchise-record) 67 wins while collecting more All-Star votes and selling more jerseys than anyone. He earned MVP honors and led the champs in playoff points, assists, steals and player efficiency rating.
His popularity forced the sports information director at Davidson College, a school Curry last attended in 2009, to change his office phone number because too many people were calling in an attempt to reach Curry.
He's a megastar in every sense, and yet, he's not the player league executives would choose to build a franchise around. In an annual survey by NBA.com, 86.2 percent of general managers picked Davis.
Truth be told, there is no wrong answer to that hypothetical inquiry.
The stat sheet shows both phenoms should be held in similarly sky-high regard.
| Stephen Curry | 23.8 | 6th | 28.0 | 3rd | 9.34 | 1st |
| Anthony Davis | 24.4 | 4th | 30.8 | 1st | 8.18 | 4th |
But the numbers, impressive as they are, don't capture the full range of these almost mythical beasts. It's the manner in which Curry and Davis flood box scores that positions them as contemporary elites.
Curry is perhaps the perfect offensive weapon for today's perimeter-oriented game.
He rains down triples with the accuracy of a three-point specialist (his career percentage of 44.05 is third-highest in league history), but he does so while carrying the heavy workload of an offensive focal point. He has twice set the mark for made threes in a single season (272 in 2012-13 and 286 last year), and he's had a top-10 usage percentage in each of the past two campaigns.
His shooting range reaches virtually every corner of the playing surface, and he's a threat to pull the trigger at any time. And backing off him equates to conceding a basket; Curry made 42.5 percent of his pull-up threes last season, a mark that would have ranked as the seventh-best conversion rate overall.
"There's nothing you can do," Davis said of defending Curry, per Ron Higgins of the Times-Picayune. "You try to pressure him and run him off the [three-point] line, and he hit incredible shots in the lane. You back off so he won't drive, he's going to hit a three. So, you've got to pick your poison."
Davis, by the way, finished fourth in last season's Defensive Player of the Year voting. And his defensive strategy for handling Curry amounts to selecting the lesser of multiple evils.
Then again, it's not like he's the only one struggling to find answers. The sport's defensive manual fails to address how to handle a sniper who needs neither space nor his eyes on the goal to find his mark.
Of course, its creators couldn't have foreseen the rise of a round-ball superhero like Davis, either.
Back in 2009, he was a 6'3" guard hoping to land a college scholarship. Six years later, he's the 6'10", 253-pound author of the new book on basketball's big men.
"[H]e's almost a 7-foot guy who can put the ball on the floor and take it anywhere he wants," Gentry said of Davis, per Pelicans.com's Jim Eichenhofer. "He makes very good decisions, has good speed and agility. There are few guys in the league who can match that."
Few guys in league history, in fact.
Davis' 30.8 player efficiency rating from last season has only ever been topped by three players: Michael Jordan, Wilt Chamberlain and LeBron James. Davis also joined Hall of Famers Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson as the only players to average at least 24 points, 10 rebounds, 2.5 blocks and 1.4 steals.
All of that happened during his third NBA campaign.
"Davis dominates the paint at both ends of the floor, runs like a cheetah, can score on the move or on the block and put up absolutely historic numbers this past season—and he's only 22!" CBS Sports' Ken Berger wrote.
Davis' physical tools are absurd.
At the 2012 NBA Draft Combine, he sported a 7'5½" wingspan. Combining that length with size and strength alone could build an NBA force.
But Davis' arsenal extends well beyond that. There's also the coordination and fluidity left over from his days as a guard, the explosiveness of a rim-rocking wing and the developed skills of someone trying to make up for forgettable natural gifts (like pre-growth spurt Davis, for instance).
Blend all that together, and you have the proverbial unstoppable force.
| Isolation | 11.9 | 0.94 | 44.3 | 77.8 |
| PNR: Roll Man | 24.5 | 1.16 | 57.2 | 84.6 |
| Off-Ball Cuts | 8.6 | 1.54 | 72.8 | 96.1 |
| Putbacks | 8.7 | 1.29 | 63.6 | 88.9 |
Oh, and Davis is shooting triples now, too. He tossed up 13 in six preseason games and buried seven (53.8 percent).
"[His shooting stroke] definitely looked good," Pelicans guard Tyreke Evans said, per Eichenhofer. "He worked on it all summer. ... If he gets that down, the sky is the limit for him."
Considering All-Star status is now the basement for Curry and Davis, it's impossible to set a ceiling for either one.
Curry's combination of three-point quantity and quality is unlike any we've ever seen. Davis has turned finding his NBA predecessor into an exercise in futility because he's plotting his own path.
These are the heroes for a new generation of hoops fans, rivals in an era when positional designations have lost their traditional meanings.
Want to get with the NBA times? Never miss another head-to-head battle between these next-generation greats.
Unless otherwise noted, statistics courtesy of Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.
