Steph Curry has been such a dominant force in the NBA for so long that it’s difficult to imagine a time when he was anything else. Every player has to start somewhere, though. Although Steph rose to prominence in college when he led underdog Davidson to an unlikely Elite Eight run, he took a few years in the NBA to become one of the game’s best players.
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Steph’s otherworldly shooting ability was obvious from 2009, his rookie year, when he shot 43.7% from downtown. But it wasn’t until his fourth year in the league that he was fully allowed to let it fly. His 3-point attempts rose three a game to a league-high 7.7 in 2012-13, making this the first of five seasons in a row in which he led the league in 3s attempted and made.
NBA vet Andre Miller was on the Denver Nuggets in that first season when Steph began to come into his own. And he had a first-hand view of the future MVP in action when the Nuggets took on the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs in 2013.
Miller spoke with reverence for Steph’s game while talking about the series on the All the Smoke podcast. That said, he still lamented the loss.
“What was crazy is, I felt that team that we had in Denver was probably the best team,” Miller said. Given that those Nuggets won 57 games, a mark that has been equalled but never beaten, even in the Nikola Jokic era, he may be right.
In Miller’s opinion, Nuggets head coach George Karl bears the blame for the team losing that series 4-2. “George Karl, man, he was practicing us so hard for like six months, man. And right before the playoffs started, Gallinari tore his ACL, and Gallinari was our best player.”
Miller claimed that he even warned Karl against working the players too hard, saying, “Right before the playoffs started, I told George Karl, ‘Look here, man, these guys’ bodies are tired.'”
“‘Oh, we gotta get work in,'” was Karl’s response, narrated Miller. “We played the Dallas Mavericks in Denver, Gallo blew out his knee, and we gotta go play these dudes.”
The Warriors weren’t yet at their championship level. That came two years later, after they hired Steve Kerr. But Miller could see that the Dubs were going places. “That’s when I knew, [Steph] and Klay [Thompson], that ball was just going through the hoop differently,” he said.
“I know shooters, we know shooters. Ray Allen, [Peja] Stojakovic… But the way their ball went through the basket was *choo*, it didn’t even hit the net. I was so upset because I felt we could beat them,” added Miller.
That year was the fourth consecutive year that the Nuggets were eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. And, after the season ended, they fired Karl just a month after he took home the Coach of the Year award.
Miller was traded to the Wizards at next year’s trade deadline. The Nuggets went on to miss the playoffs five straight times. The Warriors, as we all know, went the other direction, winning NBA titles in 2015, 2017, and 2018.
