Steph Curry is Magic

Or maybe he’s Larry Bird. But he’s definitely among the 10 best players of all-time.

Growing up in East Lansing, Michigan in the 1980s, we idolized Magic Johnson. How couldn’t we? A superstar at Everett High School in Lansing and then at Michigan State University, Magic was always going to be our guy. Plus, since the Lakers were in the Western Conference, Magic didn’t present the conflict of interest that Larry Bird or Michael Jordan did to the Detroit Pistons — until, of course, the Pistons took on the Lakers in the 1988 and 1989 NBA Finals, losing the first bout in seven games but winning the second time in a sweep.

So it’s no faint praise from me to suggest — after he iced the Gold Medal Game for Team USA against France yesterday with a series of 3-pointers that could only be described as completely and utterly ridiculous — Steph Curry belongs in the same vicinity as Magic in the conversation about the greatest basketball players of all time.

In February, 2022, The Athletic ranked Johnson as the 5th-best player of all-time and Curry “just” 15th. That was before Curry’s fourth title with the Warriors and three more All-NBA appearances, so he’d surely rank higher today (certainly higher than his teammate Kevin Durant, then #13 on the list). But as a basketball history buff and a reader of NBA vibes, I generally don’t get the sense that Curry is a consensus top 10 all-time player, and I think he very much should be.

The point is demonstrated by a tale-of-the-tape comparison between Magic and Steph — a comparison that (spoiler alert) I think Johnson wins, although Curry could plausibly draw things to a tie with some further late-career heroics. But it’s close — really close. They both revolutionized the sport, and I don’t think you can have Magic as your #5 all-time player and not have Steph somewhere in your Top 10. 

Perhaps the clearest indication of this is when we bring the third wheel into the conversation: Johnson’s rival, Bird. Johnson probably also wins the tale-of-the-tape against Bird — however, Bird is an undisputed Top 10 player (#7 on The Athletic’s list) and that’s probably about where Steph belongs. Because the tale-of-the-tape comparison between Bird and Curry very much looks like a draw, a matter of taste, and if anything Lean Curry.

Let’s do this in Hillary-vs-Bernie meme style format, starting with some basic biographical information that most NBA fans could recite by heart:

The three players have a conveniently similar number of lifetime games and minutes played, meaning that we don’t have to worry too much about peak value vs. career value considerations. None of these are particularly long careers (only Bird ranks in the top 100 in career NBA minutes played, and he’s just 88th) although that’s for varying reasons: Johnson’s HIV diagnosis, Bird’s injuries, and the fact that Curry played three years in college and that his career isn’t over yet.¹

Discussions of historical player rankings usually start and sometimes end with hardware (MVPs) and ringz (Championships), and on that basis Curry probably comes out 3rd of 3, but it’s close. He has two MVPs to three each for Johnson and Bird, and one less title than Johnson but one more than Bird. And Curry has two fewer All-Star appearances than Magic or Bird, though he’ll probably eventually surpass both.

Both Magic and Curry have uncannily good playoff records, winning more than two-thirds of their playoff games². And both Magic and Bird also have uncannily good regular season records, with both players joining franchises that were already highly successful.³ All three have exactly one Olympic Gold Medal (and all three only played for Team USA once). Only Johnson has an NCAA title, but Bird and Curry also had highly memorable college careers. Only Bird has been on an All-Defensive team, though never the 1st Team. Steph has surprisingly few All-NBA 1st Team appearances (4), which is maybe the biggest strike against him anywhere in this comparison.

As much as their careers rhyme with one another, Magic, Bird and Curry had radically different approaches to the game: Showtime vs. Lunch Pail Larry vs. The Greatest Shooter of All-Time. But by traditional statistics, Bird probably comes out a little behind the other two. I didn’t realize how efficient Johnson was (his true shooting percentage is behind the famously efficient Curry, but only slightly behind) or how many triple-doubles he had (third all-time).

Only Curry had a scoring title, however, and he’s considerably ahead of the other two on the Black Ink Test — a term I’ve borrowed from Bill James, which refers to seasons in boldface in a table of player statistics⁴, designating being the league leader in a category. That’s because of the shooting — the number of times Steph lead the NBA in 3-point scoring or free-throw percentage.⁵

By advanced stats, it’s Johnson by a hair — and then a rough tie between Curry and Bird. According to Win Shares, the players had nearly identical three-year peaks, by which I mean three consecutive seasons: Bird from 1984-85 through 1986-87, Curry from 2013-14 through 2015-16, and Magic from 1988-89 through 1990-91. (Note that this was toward the end of Johnson’s career; his HIV diagnosis interrupted him when he was very much still in his prime.⁶) But Johnson was the most consistent performer, and Johnson and Curry saw their performances hold up slightly better in the playoffs than Bird did.

Although Win Shares and BPM/VORP are the best we can do for historical comparisons, it’s something of an open question who would come out ahead by next-gen statistics, which take advantage of player tracking and play-by-play data. Curry has always been very well-liked by RAPTOR, the next-gen stat that I created. (Yes, RAPTOR is probably coming back at some point — more about that soon). In my attempt to calculate a historical proxy version of RAPTOR, Curry’s 2015-16 season ranks as the 5th best year since the ABA-NBA merger — the highest of anyone not named Jordan or LeBron. But this approximate version of RAPTOR is generally also keen on Bird and Johnson — it loves Johnson’s efficiency and versatility, and it thinks that Bird’s defense was probably underrated. Johnson’s game would undoubtedly translate extremely well into the modern NBA — he was in some ways the original Unicorn. And if you think Bird’s wouldn’t, there’s a 3-time MVP who plays for the Denver Nuggets who might beg to differ with you.

Finally, there’s a very non-objective statistic: Vibe Score, which reflects the attempt I made a few months ago to survey NBA fans on Twitter about whether a player has great vibes, good vibes or bad vibes. This was an attempt to account for intangibles such as “leadership, iconicness, historical importance, being a winner, charisma and likability.” Curry and Magic both came out as having great vibes — essentially in a 3-way tie⁷ for the second-best vibes of all-time, behind only Bill Russell. 

If for some reason you were on the fence about whether Curry belongs among the all-time greats, the fact that he’s one of the most likable athletes of all-time might be a reason to break the tie in his favor. And his Olympics heroics might push that vibes rating even higher. But I don’t actually think it’s all that close. Four titles + two MVPs + greatest shooter of all time + revolutionized the sport of basketball is a hell of a resume, comfortably within the 10 best of all-time.

1. Plus, Curry missed most of the 2011-12 and 2019-20 NBA seasons with injuries.

2. In the charts, if a metric is very close — i.e. Johnson’s .674 lifetime playoff winning percentage against Steph’s .673 — I’m going ahead and declaring it a tie.

3. Although, the Celtics had two bad years immediately before Bird was drafted.

4. Such as on baseball-reference.com, though I believe the term originally referred to The Baseball Encyclopedia.

5. The categories I considered for the Black Ink Test were: points (per game and total), rebounds (per game and total), assists (per game and total), blocks (per game and total), steals (per game and total), field goals made, free throws made, 3-pointers made, FG%, FT% and 3P%.

6. Absent that, Magic might very well have been in GOAT discussions.

7. With Shaquille O'Neal.