Ever since Stephen Curry rained in what Ian Eagle immediately and perfectly dubbed the “Golden Dagger” in this summer’s Olympics, I’ve been thinking about where that shot ranks among the most iconic shots I’ve seen throughout my lifetime. Roughly, that dates back to the early 1990s, when I really started watching NBA basketball.
But obviously that’s an arbitrary and highly personal cutoff. So then I narrowed it to the 2000s. That takes out all the Michael Jordan shots, the Reggie Miller eight points in nine seconds, the Larry Johnson four-point play and the Mario Elie kiss of death, the Alonzo Mourning fall-on-his-back buzzer beater, the Steve Kerr and John Paxson Finals winners, the Magic Johnson All-Star Game 3-pointer, the Patrick Ewing missed finger roll and a bunch of others.
Those shots will never be forgotten, but they also won’t be on this list. Other shots that won’t make this list: Dunks and free throws. Dunks are their own category, and free throws aren’t field goals. That removes Klay Thompson walking to the line and sinking a pair on a torn ACL in the 2019 Finals, the famous Kobe Bryant lob to Shaquille O’Neal in the 2000 Western Conference finals, and Vince Carter’s dunk over seven-footer Frederic Weis in the 2000 Olympics. All other shots qualify.
So, without further ado, here are my 21 most iconic shots by NBA players of the 21st century. Note: They aren’t all game-winners, and they didn’t all come in the playoffs. The unofficial barometer of these rankings is how clear the shot remains in the average fan’s head, or how quickly someone would recall the shot. If it’s an “oh yeah, I forgot about that one” shot, it’s further down on the list. Here we go.
21. Dirk stamps out Heat (2011)
It’s too bad that this shot isn’t even more memorable, because it was the signature shot of one of the more signature championships of this century. Dallas was well on its way to going down 2-0 in the 2011 Finals as Miami’s Big 3 had raced out to 15-point lead with just over seven minutes to play in the fourth quarter. The Mavericks proceeded to close the game on a 22-5 run, with Dirk Nowitzki scoring Dallas’ final nine points including this game-winning lefty scoop with 3.6 seconds to play, before going on to win the series in six.
20. Durant’s Game 3 dagger (2017)
When Kevin Durant pulled up for this transition 3 in Game 3 of the 2017 Finals, with the Warriors down two and under a minute to play, and being that it was over LeBron James, a lot of silly symbolism talk started going around about it signaling Durant’s official supplanting of James as the world’s best player. That wasn’t true. But Durant wasn’t far off, and still isn’t, and he was absolutely ridiculous in this series in averaging over 35 PPG on 56/47/93 shooting splits.
Durant buried another Game 3 dagger in the 2018 Finals, but in that one the Warriors were already winning. This one was different. Cleveland was right there to win this game and and potentially make it a series at 2-1. Durant ended any thought of that. James was clearly worried about getting beat with Durant coming at him with a head of steam, but you just can’t give KD this kind of space when a 3-pointer beats you and a two only ties.
19. Luka dances on Gobert’s grave (2024)
This is the most recent NBA shot on our list. Game 2 of the 2024 Western Conference finals. Mavs trail by two as the final seconds tick down. Luka Doncic, who has already hit a number of memorable shots in his young career, gets the switch he wants and goes to work one on one against poor Rudy Gobert, who is on an island and has no chance of staying connected as Doncic goes into his bag for his patented step-back.
After hitting this shot, Doncic had some choice words for Gobert, who is, shall we say, less than liked by a lot of NBA players. That’s part of the indelible memory of the shot itself. The bigger question here is why Gobert was in the game in the first place. Minnesota coach Chris Finch confirmed after the game that the plan was to switch all screens, in which case, Doncic hunting Gobert was inevitable. Finch put his big man in an impossible situation, and Luka made them pay dearly.
18. LeBron works his Magic (2009)
LeBron James went wild in the 2009 Eastern Conference finals against the Magic by averaging 38.5 points, 8.3 rebounds and 8.0 assists. It wasn’t enough as Orlando eliminated the Cavs in six, but LeBron still walked away with the signature shot of the series and of his young career with a buzzer-beating 3 to steal Game 2. The shot. The reaction. It’s all etched clear as day in our collective basketball memory.
17. Curry puts Clippers in blender (2015)
Stephen Curry changed basketball in two ways, with his ability to shoot from virtually unlimited distances and off the dribble with a level of efficiency that never could’ve been imagined. He completely rewrote the definition of what constitutes a “good shot,” and there is perhaps no better example of this than when he freewheeled through the Clippers like a bunch of traffic cones before spinning and sinking what would be an absolutely horrible shot for anyone else in basketball history.
“I remember from the sideline him looking like Curly Neal from the Harlem Globetrotters,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said afterward. “In my mind, I’m thinking about every coach that I’ve ever had in my life, their voice was in my head saying that’s a terrible shot. What I eventually figured out is that it’s a great shot, because it’s Steph Curry. The numbers don’t lie. That’s a shot he makes over 40% of the time. I finally realized, Steph gets to shoot whenever he wants.”
16. Chris Paul finishes Spurs (2015)
Paul has gotten a lot of criticism over the years for not being able to finish playoff series. He is, in fact, the only player in history to squander four 2-0 series leads. But in 2015, he flipped the script as it was Paul’s Clippers recovering from an 0-2 hole to knock out the defending championship Spurs, and it was Paul who banked in the Game 7 winner with one second to play.
This is an even cooler cut of the shot, showing just how difficult an angle it was as Paul just barely cleared the outstretched fingertips of Tim Duncan.
15. LeBron becomes scoring king (2023)
LeBron James passed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as the NBA’s career scoring leader with a 15-foot fallaway against the Thunder on Feb. 7, 2023. There was nothing particularly memorable about the shot, yet everyone remembers it. We were all tracking his points over the preceding weeks. Every media outlet was doing some kind of countdown. He needed 36 to get the record at home against OKC. He ended the night with 38,390 career points, a total that has since risen to 40,474.
14. Durant’s toe on the line (2021)
One of the league’s all-time”what if” shots, Durant was an inch, literally, from eliminating the Milwaukee Bucks with a remarkable turnaround jumper to give the Brooklyn Nets what appeared to be a one-point lead with one second to play in Game 7 of in the 2021 Eastern Conference semifinals. However, upon review, Durant’s “big-ass toe,” as he called it, was barely on the line, turning the 3-pointer to a two and instead tying the score.
If Durant wears a size 17 shoe instead of a size 18, the Nets probably win that game and that series and end up playing the Atlanta Hawks in the conference finals. The what ifs from there can go any number of directions.
For one, Giannis Antetokounmpo doesn’t have a ring. Maybe Chris Paul does. Or, maybe Durant gets his first away from Steph Curry and the Warriors, which would in turn have given James Harden his first ring and Kyrie Irving his first away from LeBron. In that case, maybe Durant, Irving and Harden are still playing for the Nets. Instead, they are playing for the Suns, Mavericks and Clippers, respectively.
Or, the conference finals go another way and the Hawks get into the Finals because the Nets were banged up (Harden left after one minute in Game 1 and sat through Game 4 with hamstring tightness while Irving missed Games 5-7 with a sprained ankle). How are we talking about Trae Young if he has an NBA Finals appearance under his belt. Hell, with the way the Hawks were playing that postseason, they might have won it all had the Bucks not stopped them.
Alas, none of it happened. Instead of ending the series, Durant’t shot only sent Game 7 to overtime where the Nets fell short. And the rest, as they say, is history.
13. Kobe’s last shot (2016)
The last jump shot of Kobe Bryant’s career will live forever in the NBA time capsule. It punctuated a fall-out-of-your-seat-ridiculous sequence that concluded what was perhaps the greatest exit performance in sports history: a 60-point masterpiece against the Jazz, who led by six with 90 seconds to play.
That’s when Kobe split two defenders and pulled up from the right elbow to cut the deficit to four. On the next possession, he buried a wing 3-pointer to trim Utah’s lead to one. Then he did this …
Cliche as it is, Hollywood couldn’t have scripted a better ending. It had everything that made Kobe Kobe: the classic fade on his jumpers, the refusal to give in to defeat, the steely stare focus, the showmanship — an entire team, arena, city and NBA world going berserk around him and all he could see was the basket. It’s still hard to believe Kobe is gone, but this shot and his legacy live on.
12. LeBron’s banked buzzer-beater (2018)
What LeBron James did to the Raptors after returning to Cleveland from Miami was cruel, eliminating them three straight years, the final two of which were sweeps. The ultimate nail in the coffin was LeBron’s game-winner in Game 3 of the 2018 Eastern Conference semis, when he raced end to end for a floating banker just as time expired to give Cleveland a 105-103 win and a 3-0 series lead.
11. Derek Fisher 0.4 seconds (2004)
This was two decades ago, but time has done little to diminish the memory of Fisher catching an inbound pass with his back to the basket and 0.4 seconds on the clock and somehow managing to turn and fire a hot-potato jumper clean through the net to stun the Spurs in Game 5 of the 2004 Western Conference finals.
The minimum amount of time required to catch and shoot is 0.3 seconds. Again, Fisher had 0.4, and his back was turned. I remember watching this shot live and nearly falling out of my seat. And I, along with millions upon millions of NBA fans, have never forgotten it.
10. Curry’s golden dagger (2024)
Is this recency bias? I don’t think so. In fact, I think when it’s all said and done, this ridiculous off-balance, falling-away, arcing-to-the-heavens 3-pointer to cap a personal four-3s-in-two-minutes run and seal a gold medal for the United States will go down as the second-most memorable shot of Stephen Curry’s career.
Context is king in splitting hairs for a ranking of shots like the ones we’re talking about, and given the fact that it was Curry’s first Olympic appearance, not to mention all the hoopla around Curry and LeBron finally teaming up, the anticipation of this entire Olympic run was at an all-time high. Somehow, Curry, after a bad start to the tournament, didn’t just live up to all the hype; he exceeded it. This shot was the exclamation point.
9. Kobe pulls up on Suns (2006)
This was in the “Lakers aren’t very good but Kobe is damn sure going to try to beat the world by himself” era. Bryant averaged 35 PPG in 2005-06 for the first of two consecutive scoring titles, and he looked like he was about to eliminate the Suns in the first round of the playoffs.
It was Game 4. The Lakers were up 2-1 in the series. After Kobe had tied the game with a twisting layup off a Smush Parker steal in the closing seconds of regulation, he ran down a jump ball in overtime as it was heading out of bounds and, with the Lakers down one, turned and raced straight to the right elbow for his patented pull-up jumper.
If you were watching this game, this is one of those shots you would have bet your life was going in the instant it left his fingertips. For me, perhaps because of the classic fist-pump reaction, this is the most memorable shot of Kobe’s career, and I don’t think I’m alone in that opinion.
8. Lillard grounds Rockets (2014)
Damian Lillard has somewhat overshadowed this shot with another, more recent series ender that we’ll get to shortly, but this is the one that got the legend of Lillard off the ground — a 30-footer off the catch to send the Blazers into the second round with under a second to play in Game 6 of their 2014 first-round series vs. Houston.
Looking back, what stands out almost as much as the shot itself his how emphatically Lillard is calling for the ball, clapping his hands and sprinting toward the in-bounder as he senses the separation he’s created from the trailing Chandler Parsons. Keep in mind, this was Lillard’s first career playoff series and just his second year in the league, and he wanted this shot. This was the birth of one of the most clutch shooters we’ve ever seen.
7. Curry pulls up on OKC (2016)
It wasn’t in the Olympics. It wasn’t even in the playoffs. But Steph Curry’s 38-foot pull-up winner against OKC in February of 2016 was an all-time shot and moment. Personally, I have never reacted to a shot as wildly as I did this one. Mike Breen’s double-bang says it all. Nobody could believe what they just saw.
Curry was on another planet this entire season. Every game he was making multiple shots that defied logic, and he was doing it routinely. He had 46 in this game against the Thunder. The Warriors were down 11 with under five minutes to play.
But that season, when Curry hit 402 3-pointers at a laughable 45% clip, you could be up 30 on the Warriors and still be worried. Curry just kept firing. And eventually, he almost always got hot. He was can’t-miss TV for the simple fact that he would, on a random night in February, casually pull up from nearly half court in a tie game, in overtime, when his team had a timeout in its pocket.
Forget the talent. The sheer audacity of this shot is worthy of a top-10 ranking on this list. Curry will likely never make a more memorable one.
6. Robert Horry guts Kings (2002)
These early 2000s Lakers-Kings playoff series were classics, and in the 2002 Western Conference finals it looked like Sacramento was going to get over the hump with a 2-1 series lead and a two point lead in the closing seconds of Game 4.
Kobe missed a potential game-tying layup. Shaq missed the putback. That’s when Vlade Divac swatted the ball away from the basket hoping time would expire. Instead, it served as a perfectly chest-high kickout pass to the waiting Robert Horry, who absolutely gutted the Kings with this unforgettable buzzer-beater.
After the game, Divac called this a “lucky shot.”
“That wasn’t no luck shot,” Horry responded. “I’ve been doing that all my entire career. He should know. He better read a paper or something.”
Horry was right. You don’t get the name Big Shot Bob for nothing. Dude has made more big shots than just about any player in history, and none were bigger than this.
5. Dame waves goodbye (2019)
Under any circumstances, watching Lillard bleed down the clock to its final ticks before pulling up for a sidestep 38-foot buzzer-beater to win a playoff series would’ve been epic. But it was the bad blood that was bubbling between Lillard and the Thunder — he and Russell Westbrook had been jabbing in the media for years, and Dennis Schroder had mocked Lillard’s “Dame Time” wrist tap earlier in the series — that took it to another level.
Forget Steph’s “night-night” or Kobe’s fist pump or even Jordan’s hanging follow through in Utah; Lillard literally waving goodbye to the Thunder bench was the most savage sendoff in NBA history.
4. Kawhi bounces 76ers (2019)
I swear this ball is still sitting on the rim half a decade later. So many careers and franchise fortunes hanging in the balance. If it drops out, maybe the 76ers win in overtime and Joel Embiid at least has a conference finals appearance on his resume, if not more than that considering the Warriors were hobbled. Maybe the Ben Simmons thing goes differently. Maybe Jimmy Butler stays.
Instead, the ball falls through the net and everything changes. The Sixers start breaking up. The Raptors go on to win the first and only championship in franchise history. Kawhi Leonard becomes the most sought-after commodity on the market, and even manages to break up the Thunder on his way to the Clippers by bringing Paul George with him.
The shot. The reaction. The future fortunes and fallout. This shot had it all, a Game 7 buzzer beater unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
3. Allen Iverson’s Step Over (2001)
It wasn’t a series-winner or even a game-winner, but who could ever forget Allen Iverson hitting the brakes on Ty Lue, stepping back and swishing a corner jumper, and then stepping over Lue as he sat on the ground helplessly in Game 1 of the 2001 NBA Finals?
Iverson, who was an absolute one-man offense for these Sixers, scored 48 points over 52 minutes in this overtime win for Philly. The Lakers won the next four games to win the series handily, but it has been the step-over image that has endured.
In Everything But The Chip: The 2001 76ers, Iverson recalled of the step-over move … “I can’t tell you what the feeling was like. I can’t duplicate it. I was in the moment. I just know [Lue] fell in front of me; I don’t know how I even thought about stepping over him like that. I was just playing basketball.”
Lue, for his part, has never understood the big deal with the move.
“People make a big deal over it like he crossed me over and I fell down and then he stepped over me,” Lue said on an appearance on All the Smoke. “He hit a contested shot and I stepped back and I fell, he stepped over top of me. For me, it wasn’t a big deal. To this day it’s not a big deal.”
Lue is right. He actually defended that step-back about as well as anyone could have. He got a hand up on the shot and then stumbled afterward. It’s not like Iverson broke his ankles with the actual move. Still, it’s a sequence of events that time has done nothing to fade. Iverson stepping over Lue is as clear an image as it was more than two decades ago.
2. Ray Allen rescues the Heat (2013)
This was a legacy-altering shot but it wasn’t Allen’s legacy in the balance; it was LeBron James’ after he changed the NBA as we know it, or knew it, by forming the Big 3 in Miami. If Allen doesn’t hit this shot in the closing seconds of Game 6, LeBron loses his second Finals in three years in Miami and is 3-7 in the Finals for his career, which somehow sounds a lot worse than 4-6.
But Allen changed history by first knowing exactly how far to backpedal to the corner off a Chris Bosh offensive rebound, and second by actually drilling the shot to tie the game. The Heat went on to win in overtime, and two days later closed out the series in Game 7.
1. Kyrie Irving puts the Cavs ahead in Game 7 (2016)
This is a painful memory for the Northern California kid and longtime Warriors fan in me, but I have to admit, my nostalgic allegiances notwithstanding, I kind of smiled when this shot went in. It was all I could muster, but I had to tip my hat to Kyrie and the Cavs. To be down 3-1 against a 73-win team and come back to win the championship on a shot like this? Wow.
That’s the shot every kid dreams up in the driveway. Game 7. Tie score. One on one against the MVP. All the weight of a championship drought in Cleveland that had lasted well over half a century resting on your shoulders, and you rise up and stick the that kind of dagger? Say what you want about Kyrie, but this was, is, and forever will be one of the NBA’s most legendary shots.
