Stephen Curry is the greatest shooter in the history of basketball.
You won’t find an argument on that from 99 percent of fans. But one dissenter has made himself known: Fox Sports Radio’s Rob Parker.
Curry has done more 3-point taking and making than anyone in the history of the NBA. He hits shots off the dribble and off the catch, moving left and moving right, stepping back and stepping in, from any distance.
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That’s all allowed him to hit more than 4,000 3-pointers in his career. Parker, though, doesn’t think Curry is the greatest.
“He’s just not the greatest shooter of all-time,” Parker said on Sunday. “That’s where we’re going to put this. Because I’m still going to say I would take a lot of other players in a big moment. This is what I’m saying, we can open this up sooner than later because I really want to hear from people and hear what I’m saying. When you call someone the greatest shooter, it means under any circumstance, you would want them to have the ball when you need a basket. I don’t care what they all say. He has had 14 looks with a chance to tie and win the game in the postseason. And he hasn’t made one of them.”
Parker’s stats are outdated, according to Awful Announcing. Curry has shot 40.1 percent in his career in the NBA’s “clutch situation” category, just behind Michael Jordan’s 41.9 and Ray Allen’s 42.8.
The radio host wasn’t done. He went on to discount Curry’s 3-point bonanza in the Olympics, when the all-time great almost singlehandedly one the United States both the semifinal and the gold medal match.
Parker wants us to stop considering just the numbers for the “greatest shooter ever” moniker.
“That’s all I’m saying,” Parker said. “I think he is disqualified from being considered the greatest shooter. Is he the greatest three-point maker? Without question. I would be lying to you if I sat here and said he wasn’t, he is. But there is a difference between the two. I really believe that. I would give Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, Michael Jordan, any of those people, the ball with the game on the line before I gave it to Steph Curry.”
That’s often been one of the criticisms leveled at LeBron James, too, that he somehow isn’t clutch enough.
That discounts the fact that often, Curry has blitzed the other team so definitively that the game isn’t even close late.
And it’s not hard to remember Curry’s legendary shot at Oklahoma City during the 73-win season that is one of the greatest shots of this era. Pretty clutch, we’d say.
This is really more words than need to be devoted to this topic.
Curry is the greatest shooter ever. Ray Allen and Reggie Miller will both admit it. So will everyone else, except this one guy who clearly doesn’t know how to appreciate greatness.
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