With as many all-time great players as are assembled on this Team USA men’s basketball roster at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Stephen Curry, prior to Thursday’s semifinal matchup with Serbia, had not gotten the opportunity to shine in a manner befitting his reputation as the greatest shooter and arguably most electric scorer in basketball history.
Most of the opportunities he did have, he wasn’t able to take advantage of as he misfired on 15 of his first 20 Olympic 3-pointers. But Steve Kerr stuck with him, and when it counted the most, Curry delivered what can only be described as one of the greatest performances American basketball has ever seen.
Finishing with 36 points on nine 3-pointers in a thrilling 95-91 win over Serbia for a trip to the gold medal game, Curry now owns the second-highest single-game point total in U.S. Olympic history, trailing only the 37 that Carmelo Anthony hung on Nigeria in 2012.
The major difference? The Americans beat the Nigerians that day by 83 points. Anthony could’ve sat the entire game out and it wouldn’t have mattered. His buckets were gratuitous. Every single point that Curry put on the board, on the other hand, was essential. Even one less 3-pointer, and the Americans probably lose this game.
Fittingly, it was Curry who gave the Americans their first lead with a midrange jumper 11 seconds into the game. Roughly two hours later, it was Curry, at the 2:24 mark of the fourth quarter, who gave them their next lead, which they wouldn’t relinquish, with a curling, catch-and-shoot 3-pointer that might well go down as the biggest shot of his life.
That’s quite a statement. The biggest shot of Stephen Curry’s life. There’s certainly an expansive library from which to choose, and I’ll admit right upfront that I’m prone to being a prisoner of the moment. Hell, less than a week ago I was questioning whether Kerr could keep starting or even playing Curry given his small-sample struggles in a small-sample tournament.
I will say, there were reasonable grounds for having an uncomfortable Curry conversation given the way he was playing and the hard stance Kerr had, and has, taken throughout these Olympic Games in terms of sitting elite players. Jayson Tatum, an All-NBA player the last three years and the best player on a championship team, has been benched for two entire games. Joel Embiid, an MVP, never saw the court for one. Curry was bad, his gravity factor notwithstanding, through the first four games of this tournament.
Perhaps this kind of Curry performance, as LeBron said after the game, was bound to happen. But had it come in defeat, it would’ve been reduced to a footnote, if not forgotten entirely. Through that lens, forget the first eight 3-pointers Curry made. Had that ninth one not caromed in, he might’ve become a different kind of goat, remembered not for his country-carrying heroics through 37 minutes, but for his inability to make the big one.
More importantly, maybe the most talented basketball team ever assembled would’ve been going home as a monumental disappointment. Instead, that team is headed to the gold medal game, and it’s impossible to overstate what that means not just to every player and coach on this roster, but specifically to Curry, who is playing in his first Olympics and has told us at every turn how special an opportunity and moment this is for him.
Part of his struggles, in fact, can likely be attributed to the weight of this moment. Even for athletes this accomplished, the Olympics are different. In 2012, I wrote a book with decathlete Dan O’Brien, who was already a three-time world champion and the world-record holder and one of the greatest track and field athletes in history before he came to Atlanta in 1996, and he told me what his decathlon heroes had told him — that nothing can prepare you for your first Olympics. He called it a baptism by fire.
Curry was feeling the heat of that fire big time. He even said how nervous he was before the first group-stage game, and those nerves only get stronger as your struggles grow and the margin for error shrinks. With the Americans staring gold medal elimination in the face, Curry rising from the ashes of his first four Olympic flameouts to pull off that performance, to make that shot in that game, says as much about his ability to narrow his focus and conjure up confidence in the face of stark struggles as it does the skill to actually shoot a basketball.
Keep in mind, Curry has long been criticized, if only by a small contingent, for his supposed big-shot shortcomings. A stat started going around the internet some time ago tracking his shots in the last minute of playoff games, when his team is trailing, to take the lead. He was 0 for 14 last I checked.
With the benefit of hindsight, you can say this kind of performance, or more specifically, this kind of shot, was inevitable at some point for a shooter and player of Curry’s caliber. But the evidence, as it does for a lot of great players in these high-pressure situations, suggests otherwise. These shots rim out more than they rim in.
Curry had a game-tying shot with 30 seconds to play Game 7 in the 2016 Finals, and he missed. He had a shot to win Game 6 of the 2019 Finals in the closing seconds, and he missed. He had the ball for Davidson, which he had led on a magical NCAA Tournament run, with a chance to upset top-seeded Kansas in the 2008 Elite Eight, and wasn’t even able to get a shot up.
For as unbelievable as Curry’s career has been, this kind of singular shot has largely evaded him. Now he has it. No, it didn’t come at the buzzer or even inside the final minute. But it was without question the shot of the game. A game that he utterly dominated from start to finish. A game that, assuming the U.S. is able to finish the job by beating France for a fifth straight gold medal, might end up going down not just as the capstone of a Hall of Fame career, but as perhaps the most important performance of Curry’s basketball life.
Because he didn’t do this for the Golden State Warriors. He did this for his country, as trite as that sounds, and for the other 11 players wearing the USA jersey. There’s a different kind of pride in the responsibility to honor not so much your own talent, but the great talent with which you are surrounded.
“It’s an unbelievable feeling to win a gold medal for your country,” Kobe Bryant once said. “We’re all together, we’re all playing for USA Basketball and it carries a great honor with that that goes beyond winning the NBA championship.”
That’s what the Olympics mean to these guys. It’s the greatest athletic stage anyone can stand on, and Curry, for one unforgettable night, for one immortal shot, claimed it as his own.
