Stephen Curry is one of the most prolific scorers today, however, the GSW star would often be benched in crunch time almost a decade ago.
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Stephen Curry has established himself as one of the best players in NBA history. With the virtue of the GSW leader being the greatest marksman, the 6-foot-3 sharpshooter managed to rack up one of the most decorated resumes of all-time – 8 All-Star and All-NBA selections, 2 MVPs, 4 titles, 1 Finals MVPs, and a whole bunch of other achievements.
Today, Curry is one of the deadliest scorers in the league. During crunch time, Steph is the go-to man for the San Francisco-based organization. However, this didn’t seem to be the case a decade back.
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Recently, Jeremy Lin, a former Warrior, disclosed that then-head coach Keith Smart would bench The Baby-Faced Assassin every fourth quarter. In an interview with Sky Sports’ Stuart Hodge, the $36 million worth former NBA champ revealed:
“I was with him my rookie year. The coach that we had didn’t believe that much in Steph and would bench him a lot, get on him, yell at him a lot, was just really tough on him. It almost became normal that every fourth quarter, he would get benched for a certain stretch. I felt that would shake any player to some degree and even though his confidence would kind of waver a little bit – because of the way that he was being coached – he had a deep, deep, very strong belief that he was a great player and that he would become a great player, and that the way things were going at that time was not how they were always going to go.”
“I didn’t know Stephen Curry was going to be legendary, revolutionary, transforming the entire course of basketball”: Jeremy Lin
Lin further recalled that SC30 would never let any circumstances change his approach to the game.
“He was always believing in who he was and how he could play, and the shots he can make, and sticking to it. Sometimes it would get him benched, but other times it allowed him to take over the game – as long as he stuck with it and didn’t change who he was as a player. He felt like over time people would understand, ‘Hey, I’m great and I will develop the freedom and trust that I deserve as a player’.”
Ultimately, the 33-year-old Taiwanese-American stated how he never expected his then-scrawny teammate to be one of the most revolutionary players in the history of the game.
“I did not think he was going to be that good,” Lin said. “But I didn’t understand why Steph was treated the way he was in that one season I was there. I felt like he was really, really good. As poorly as he was treated, he still averaged 18 or 19 points. I thought, ‘Imagine when this guy gets a couple more years of experience under his belt, and really gets the reins, the keys to the franchise, what he will be able to do’.
‘So, I always knew he was going to be great. But I didn’t know he was going to be like legendary, revolutionary, transforming the entire course of basketball. I did not expect all of that.”
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