Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry might not be in Shaquille O’Neal list of top-10 NBA players of all time, but for the city of San Francisco, he might as well have been touched by the divine.
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Curry was drafted by the Warriors in 2009 and has been with them for 16 seasons, playing in 1,026 games and leading them to four NBA championships. On an individual level, he has averaged 24.7 points, 6.4 assists and 4.7 rebounds per game.
With Steph being 37 years old, it’s natural to wonder if he has many more great years in him. According to ESPN’s Marc J. Spears, Curry could play well into his 40s.
Spears joined Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller on The OGs podcast, where he talked about his own career, the move to NBA journalism and how that coincided with the journey Curry was about to begin.
“In ‘09 I ended up getting my first NBA job with Yahoo Sports … I moved back home to the Bay, and they had a rookie named Steph Curry … I got to see ‘bad-ankle Steph,’” Spears revealed.
Miller also joined Spears in going down memory lane and informed viewers of the discourse around Curry in NBA circles that year. “When Steph got his first major deal, second contract, everyone thought they overpaid his a**, remember that?” he asked.
“[Steph] wasn’t even an All-Star yet … And Warriors fans, if they were honest … would have been more comfortable with them trading him than Monta [Ellis] at the time … [The] Warriors were such a downtrodden franchise at that time that they were more in love with somebody that would put up 30 than winning games,” Spears asserted.
“They never won. They were awful, forever,” the scribe noted before adding that the last 10 years have been an exception to what he called one of the “most awful” franchises in sports. Spears was happy to remind fans that, even though he loved the old Warriors players, they didn’t achieve much.
“But the Curry influence, when he got cooking and got going with Clay and Draymond and a good team around him, he had an affect on the Bay,” Spears claimed. “Growing up in the Bay, I saw Montana, Rice, Ricky Henderson, Barry Bonds … I saw the best of the best … but Steph united the Bay.”
“He got old ladies loving basketball … wearing ‘30’ jerseys. And you couldn’t go into a restaurant in the Bay … on a Warriors night unless you had a TV on. So there was a restaurant I like, and they had ‘Curry Effect’ on the wall. They didn’t want a TV, but nobody came to have dinner there … So they put a TV in there,” continued Spears, getting a tad nostalgic.
Spears went on to reiterate that Curry’s influence on the Bay was something for the books. “He got cred in the hood of Oakland. He’s like Mr. Fab, and he goes to play pickups sometimes, like little events and stuff.”
According to Spears, Curry is so loved that if someone said he was in trouble, people from Oakland would arrive in droves to stand by his side.
“He’s a god there, and the day he retires in the Bay, you’re going to see a lot of people crying,” Spears concluded as the rest of the panel agreed Curry’s even a better person in real life.
