You might say that reigning MVP Stephen Curry had an off night in the 114-98 Warriors win over the Nets Sunday night. He finished with a game-high 28 points and two assists, both below his season averages.
But Curry did do one thing at about his standard pace: he hit five three-pointers in nine attempts. He’s now hit 116 threes on the season, extending his Secretariat-esque lead over the competition, which includes the entire Nets roster.
Earlier this year, we introduced CurryWatch, tracking how many three-pointers Stephen Curry the player has hit in comparison to the Nets as a team. With 20 Nets games under the belt, he’s still winning.
In two more games, Curry has hit 23 more three-pointers. There has yet to be a point in this NBA season where the Nets as a team have had more three-pointers than Curry alone.
What began as a somewhat silly thought exercise and has now become a defining point of this 20-game Nets season. With the NBA trending rapidly towards three-point shooting, the Nets have been left in the dust, ranking last in three-pointers made, attempted, and three-point percentage among all NBA teams at the quarter-way mark.
If their percentage holds, they would become the first NBA team in a non-lockout season to shoot below 30 percent from three-point range since the 2002-2003 Denver Nuggets.
Most curious about the Nets’ lack of shooting is that they don’t lack shooters. Four Nets boast a career three-point percentage over 35 percent (though one, Andrea Bargnani, has shot 30 percent from three in the last four seasons). Those four players — Bargnani, Joe Johnson, Wayne Ellington, and Bojan Bogdanovic — have combined to shoot 27.6 percent from three this year. Only point guards Shane Larkin (16-for-32) and Jarrett Jack are shooting over 30 percent from deep.
Jack blamed the team’s lack of disrupting offense. “We’ve got to attack and get better looks for the most part. We struggle so much getting penetration that we don’t suck the defense in and allow to give ourselves those opportunities for threes.”
To their credit, they’ve played the Warriors well this season. They were a missed Brook Lopez layup at the buzzer away from ending their undefeated season, using their size advantage in the paint to rack up as many points as possible.
Also to their credit, the team has answered numerous questions about their lack of three-point shooting. When asked about the team’s lack of three-point shooting from a regular (okay, me) Friday night against the Knicks, Hollins looked at that regular (again, me) and said, “I don’t know if you’ve been around, but that question’s been asked before,” before continuing to answer. “If we can make shots, I don’t care where they’re from. I don’t have a problem with shooting threes. We don’t get them, and we don’t make them when we get them. So yes, I would like for us to shoot more threes, if we can get to shoot threes. We haven’t gotten a lot of clean looks at threes, and when we have, we haven’t made a lot.”
