[ed. Curry is like a young Tiger Woods. Totally dominating (and a beauty to watch).]
A perfectly executed jump shot is among the most beautiful things in all of sports. Dunks are more ostentatiously athletic, but they end in a staccato thud, a brute pounding of the basket. Like baseball swings, tennis shots, and tackles in football, dunks have the quality of abrupt endings, of momentous and violent collisions between moving objects and determined people. A jump shot, by contrast, is all flow. An athlete takes one or two steps, pauses to gather his body, and then leaps—straight up, if he’s doing things correctly. As he rises, he holds the ball in the palm of one hand while the other gently cradles it from behind. The shooting arm is bent at a ninety-degree angle, its upper half parallel to the floor. The shooting elbow travels upward on a narrow path within inches of the torso, to insure an efficient and steady glide; the other arm folds over, framing the face of the shooter. Then the shooting arm uncoils, exploding into a rigid staff: the ball is launched upward, at an angle, usually, between forty and sixty degrees relative to the shooter’s body. At the top of the player’s leap, before letting the ball go, his shooting hand offers its final adjustments by flicking quickly forward and letting the ball roll backward off the fingertips, insuring that it spins in the opposite direction from which it’s travelling. The backspin works to insure that whatever the ball grazes—the backboard, a piece of the rim—will have minimal effect on its path. When all of this is done just so, the ball drops noiselessly into the woven nylon net, rippling the ropes as little as possible on its way through. By then, a confident shooter will already be on his way down the floor, perhaps with a hand raised in triumph as thousands of people scream and high-five strangers. A perfect shot is swift and noiseless and, when delivered at the right time, can end an opponent’s chances. This is why the man who has lately become its most storied practitioner has been called the Baby-Faced Assassin.
That killer, Stephen Curry, of the Golden State Warriors, has the most precise and stunning jump shot in the history of the National Basketball Association. Unlike other shooters, who pause with the ball at hip height to gather and set themselves, his is a single-motion shot: he enters a deep knee bend and cocks his hands to shoot in one swift, upward-flinging movement. He can charge down the floor at top speed, then halt completely and fire a shot in less than a second. And that shot is far more likely to go in than one taken by nearly anyone else. His form is precise, his jumps are generally upright, and his shooting forearm is never more than five degrees from vertical. His follow-through is textbook. Curry executes perfection faster than anyone else in professional basketball.
In March, I made my way to Oracle Arena, in Oakland, where I live, to see him do this in person. The Warriors’ home court sits beside one of the least attractive freeways in one of the least attractive parts of the city. The 880, which stretches from downtown Oakland to the rival tech hub San Jose, is narrow and crowded, marked with potholes, jammed with smoke-spewing semis, and hemmed in by graffiti-covered walls on one side and crumbling office parks on the other. The arena rises from an area of forgotten roads and weed-covered lots. (...)
Inside the arena, nearly twenty thousand fans were giddy. Sellouts were common at Oracle even during the team’s lean years; on this night, thousands arrived early just to watch Curry perform his increasingly legendary warmup routine. He started with a series of dribble drills and layups. As fans amassed in the lower seats, he began flinging mid-range jumpers, nailing shot after shot. Soon he was working beyond the three-point arc, a team assistant feeding him balls that he sent, almost without fail, through the hoop. Then he started in on his proprietary material: shots launched from well beyond the arc, far outside any region where reasonable players are comfortable. The crowd yelled for each make, groaned at each miss. Curry was either unaware of our presence or teasing us by pretending to be. By the time he reached half-court, it had become sheer performance, a circus act. With each shot taken from the mid-court logo, you could hear people inhaling breaths that weren’t let out until the ball landed.
Then Curry prepared for his final trick. A security guard cleared out the hallway that leads to the home locker room, barking at wayward reporters and the occasional oblivious visitor who happened to wander through with a hot dog and an all-access pass. Curry set up halfway down the tunnel, nearly fifty feet from the basket, directly to one side of it. He could no longer be seen from the stands. Suddenly a ball flew from the tunnel as though shot by a cannon; it bounced off the front rim, and the crowd let out a moan. The security guard, clearly relishing his role, bounced another ball down the hallway. It, too, was thrown into the air, this time sailing through the hoop, hitting nothing but net. The arena erupted. Curry shot three more from the tunnel, making one. The guard announced that the show was over and handed Curry a marker with which the point guard signed hats, posters, and jerseys for kids who had been granted special access. He waved to the crowd and ran down the hallway at full speed, disappearing into the locker room. The game hadn’t even begun, and everyone present had already been thoroughly entertained.
A perfectly executed jump shot is among the most beautiful things in all of sports. Dunks are more ostentatiously athletic, but they end in a staccato thud, a brute pounding of the basket. Like baseball swings, tennis shots, and tackles in football, dunks have the quality of abrupt endings, of momentous and violent collisions between moving objects and determined people. A jump shot, by contrast, is all flow. An athlete takes one or two steps, pauses to gather his body, and then leaps—straight up, if he’s doing things correctly. As he rises, he holds the ball in the palm of one hand while the other gently cradles it from behind. The shooting arm is bent at a ninety-degree angle, its upper half parallel to the floor. The shooting elbow travels upward on a narrow path within inches of the torso, to insure an efficient and steady glide; the other arm folds over, framing the face of the shooter. Then the shooting arm uncoils, exploding into a rigid staff: the ball is launched upward, at an angle, usually, between forty and sixty degrees relative to the shooter’s body. At the top of the player’s leap, before letting the ball go, his shooting hand offers its final adjustments by flicking quickly forward and letting the ball roll backward off the fingertips, insuring that it spins in the opposite direction from which it’s travelling. The backspin works to insure that whatever the ball grazes—the backboard, a piece of the rim—will have minimal effect on its path. When all of this is done just so, the ball drops noiselessly into the woven nylon net, rippling the ropes as little as possible on its way through. By then, a confident shooter will already be on his way down the floor, perhaps with a hand raised in triumph as thousands of people scream and high-five strangers. A perfect shot is swift and noiseless and, when delivered at the right time, can end an opponent’s chances. This is why the man who has lately become its most storied practitioner has been called the Baby-Faced Assassin.
That killer, Stephen Curry, of the Golden State Warriors, has the most precise and stunning jump shot in the history of the National Basketball Association. Unlike other shooters, who pause with the ball at hip height to gather and set themselves, his is a single-motion shot: he enters a deep knee bend and cocks his hands to shoot in one swift, upward-flinging movement. He can charge down the floor at top speed, then halt completely and fire a shot in less than a second. And that shot is far more likely to go in than one taken by nearly anyone else. His form is precise, his jumps are generally upright, and his shooting forearm is never more than five degrees from vertical. His follow-through is textbook. Curry executes perfection faster than anyone else in professional basketball.In March, I made my way to Oracle Arena, in Oakland, where I live, to see him do this in person. The Warriors’ home court sits beside one of the least attractive freeways in one of the least attractive parts of the city. The 880, which stretches from downtown Oakland to the rival tech hub San Jose, is narrow and crowded, marked with potholes, jammed with smoke-spewing semis, and hemmed in by graffiti-covered walls on one side and crumbling office parks on the other. The arena rises from an area of forgotten roads and weed-covered lots. (...)
Inside the arena, nearly twenty thousand fans were giddy. Sellouts were common at Oracle even during the team’s lean years; on this night, thousands arrived early just to watch Curry perform his increasingly legendary warmup routine. He started with a series of dribble drills and layups. As fans amassed in the lower seats, he began flinging mid-range jumpers, nailing shot after shot. Soon he was working beyond the three-point arc, a team assistant feeding him balls that he sent, almost without fail, through the hoop. Then he started in on his proprietary material: shots launched from well beyond the arc, far outside any region where reasonable players are comfortable. The crowd yelled for each make, groaned at each miss. Curry was either unaware of our presence or teasing us by pretending to be. By the time he reached half-court, it had become sheer performance, a circus act. With each shot taken from the mid-court logo, you could hear people inhaling breaths that weren’t let out until the ball landed.
Then Curry prepared for his final trick. A security guard cleared out the hallway that leads to the home locker room, barking at wayward reporters and the occasional oblivious visitor who happened to wander through with a hot dog and an all-access pass. Curry set up halfway down the tunnel, nearly fifty feet from the basket, directly to one side of it. He could no longer be seen from the stands. Suddenly a ball flew from the tunnel as though shot by a cannon; it bounced off the front rim, and the crowd let out a moan. The security guard, clearly relishing his role, bounced another ball down the hallway. It, too, was thrown into the air, this time sailing through the hoop, hitting nothing but net. The arena erupted. Curry shot three more from the tunnel, making one. The guard announced that the show was over and handed Curry a marker with which the point guard signed hats, posters, and jerseys for kids who had been granted special access. He waved to the crowd and ran down the hallway at full speed, disappearing into the locker room. The game hadn’t even begun, and everyone present had already been thoroughly entertained.
