The hot hand is not supposed to exist, or that's what early basketball analysts told us back in the 1980s to the outrage/laughter of many. Then a couple of years ago, that old analytical saw was challenged. Maybe the hot hand exists, but riding the hot hand is probably not a good idea because players on streaks begin to take questionable shots. That made some logical sense.
Any player at any level who has been in the hot streak knows of its existence. You feel a tingle in your fingertips. You become Neo-like, envisioning that moment when the ball touches your hands, and as long as you get a sliver of a glimpse at the hoop, you know you're going to re-direct the ball through the basket. There is nothing the defense can do to stop you. That feeling, in and of itself, is what keeps a lot of weekend warriors on the playground long past the point when their legs can take the pounding.
But while we know it exists, we also know how fickle the hot hand is. It just goes away. We try to recapture it by recalling what we were doing right. Where was our elbow when we released it? How did the ball sit in our shooting hand? We try to replicate it, and our form gets skewed and we miss a few ill-advised shots before realizing it's over. Hot streaks exist, but they don't last.
Unless you're Stephen Curry. Then the hot streak never ends.
Categorical dominance
Today's task is kind of silly, because we're trying to answer once and for all if Stephen Curry is having the best fantasy season ever. It's redundant. In a sense, the entire season for Curry and his team has been like a fantasy. You'd be tempted to say that last Saturday's surreal win over Oklahoma City -- where Curry began sizing up OKC's defense in the backcourt, found that tiny sliver of a glimpse he needed just past halfcourt and drilled an inevitable, 30-something-foot 3-pointer to beat the Thunder -- was an iconic moment. It was absurd. But you can't say it was the culminating moment of a historic season -- not yet, because Curry and the Warriors keep tapping into new layers of absurdity.
Grumpy Gregg Popovich recently called the 3-point shot a necessary evil (to paraphrase) of today's game. He'd rather it not exist, but since it does, you better use it wisely. He's from an era when the object of offense was to get the ball as close to the hoop as possible. Those days are gone. But who (beyond Pop) can really complain? Curry is a one-man justification for the 3-point shot. At the same time, the 3-pointer is ultimately responsible for the existence of Stephen Curry. This season, because of one player, the 3-point shot has reached full maturity, and the geometry of basketball has been forever altered.
Because Curry is so dominant in that one area, it's fair to wonder if his overall value as a fantasy player (and player in a more literal sense) is entirely derived from that skill. It's hard to pin down because while Curry surely leverages that lethal weapon into other strengths all over the court, at both the individual and team levels, he's also really good at other things.
Here's a glimpse of where Curry's category scores -- by ESPN's Player Rater formula -- rank among all categories, from all players, for each season since 1979-80:
Note: Due to some computational differences, my version of Player Rater is not an exact match of the version featured on ESPN Fantasy. Close, but not exact.
Percentile ranks measure where a result in a set of numbers rates among the other numbers in the set. So, for example, Curry's 99.9 percentile score for 3-pointers means only 0.1 percent of 3-point scores have been better. He's in the 99th percent in points, field-goal percentage and, for good measure, steals, and in the 98th in assists. If Curry could somehow also block more shots, the NBA might have to disband.
Player Rater is an interesting system because it measures players against the results of each individual season, so it makes cross-season comparisons more meaningful. And that's why Curry's 3-point score ranks "just" 18th (out of 135,315 category scores). While he's already set the single-season mark for 3s, the league as a whole is once again on target to shatter the record for most makes (and attempts) beyond the arc. That makes gleaning marginal fantasy value from 3s a more difficult task than ever.
In fact, the largest single category score does indeed come from the 3-point category. It belongs to Utah's Darrell Griffith -- the "Golden Griff" as legendary Jazz announcer Hot Rod Hundley used to call him -- who received 11.02 Player Rater points for 3s in 1983-84. (More than his Player Rater total across all categories for that season.) Griffith made 91 3s that season, more than twice that of second-place Michael Cooper, who made just 38. You can see how things have changed.
So if Curry were a one-trick player, there is no way we'd be asking the question of whether he's having the best-ever fantasy season. But he's got plenty of tricks.
Simply the best
Curry is trouncing all other players this season in Player Rater. And while his advantage over James Harden is historic, it isn't not quite the highest ever.
Larry Bird was great at everything, but he also enjoyed tremendous boosts from 3-point shooting because of the category scarcity we discussed. Still, Curry's dominance stands out in a league where Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and LeBron James are all still at the tops of their games. What's amazing and joyous about all of the players on this list is that in its purest form, basketball is a game of throwing a ball through a hoop. These guys did it better than anyone, and no one has done it better than Curry. We marvel at LeBron's brilliance; we identify with Curry's.
In previous looks at contextualizing fantasy seasons, I've included turnovers as a category because it gives a more comprehensive view of a player's contributions. However, I have to admit that most fantasy leagues ignore turnovers and the version of Player Rater featured on the site doesn't use them. So to finally answer whether the question of whether Curry is having the best fantasy season ever, I added a no-turnover version to my data. The results are no surprise.
The season isn't over, but there you have it. No one has ever done it better, more consistently, or with more panache, than Curry. He's solved the problem of the hot hand. All you have to do is become so good that you never cool off. Then fantasy and reality merge into one.