Stephen Curry has changed basketball. He’s the most influential player of his generation and, whether you like it or not, his sharp shooting skills and off-ball movement started a revolution around the league.
Even so, some people still dare question Steph’s legacy. We’re talking about the first unanimous MVP in NBA history, the face of a dynasty that won 3 rings in 5 years, a Scoring champion, and the greatest shooter of all time.
But, according to his former teammate Andrew Bogut, his basketball skills or individual accolades aren’t the most impressive thing about Curry, as he believes that his selfish character and team-first mentality are the reasons behind his success:
“The biggest thing that I respect about Steph is, he has had to modify his game a little bit after those MVP runs.I mean, two-time MVP and then lets in a guy who is essentially one of the best basketball players in the world and then would share the spotlight of being one of the best guys on the team,” Bogut said on the Dubs Talk podcast.
Bogut went on to laud Steph for embracing a different role when Kevin Durant made it to the team, stating that he never complained about the fact that he would have to share the spotlight and the ball.
Then, Steph took another step forward and once again reclaimed his spot as the team’s go-to-guy, which to Bogut is yet another testament of how mentally strong he is:
“He rolled with it. He took on a lesser role to an extent. He knew he would take less shots, he wouldn’t have the ball in his hands as much, and to go from that to back to where he is now, to flip that switch of I’m the guy again, I need to be a 30-point plus scorer, that’s hard to do.”The fact that Steph has been able to still play at an elite level within different roles, it’s a credit to him not only as a player but as a person. I can say that no matter how much guys in the NBA talk about ‘We want to win a championship’ and all that stuff, all of the sudden if it’s not you on the billboard all of the time when you’re supposed to be the franchise guy, 99 percent of the guys don’t like that. As much as they’ll lie to the media, they don’t. He genuinely was one guy that was like ‘Hey, it’s going to win us more games,” Bogut concluded.
This year, Curry is averaging a career-best (and league-leading) 31.4 points per game to go along with 5.5 rebounds, 5.8 assists, 1.2 steals, and 5.2 three-pointers per game on 48/42/91 shooting splits, proving once again that he’s one of the greatest scorers and leaders of all time.
