Keith Duggan: The Age of Steph Curry enters its last act

Late on Wednesday night, in front of a boozy and rambunctious crowd in the Boston Garden, Steph Curry found his leg trapped at an awkward ankle under the descending mass of the Celtics’ Al Horford, who is 6′8″ and weighs 17 stone.

For a few seconds, Curry disappeared from the millions of television screens in various time zones, caught under a mass of bodies scrambling for the basketball. When the scrum cleared, Curry alone remained on the iconic parquet floor — Boston’s interior decor conceit — wincing and gasping in pain.

Horford, the senior figure on a Celtics team chasing a first NBA championship in 14 years, is often caricatured as the grand old man of the league; a father figure to his youthful team-mates. But at 36, he is just two years older than Curry, whose boyish, sinewy athleticism disguises the fact that he, too, at 34, is one of the veterans of the league and fighting against the limitations of the body even as he continues to leave a unique set of fingerprints on the evolution of basketball.

It is hard to quantify the Curry effect but his influence has filtered through the culture in ways that are both explicit — the desire for a generation of juvenile basketball players to try trick passes and bomb long-range threes — and oblique — the sight of kids in all sports continually chewing their mouthguards while playing, a tic or habit which Curry has made famous.

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In the third quarter of Wednesday night’s game against Boston, Curry once again achieved the trance state which enables him to make shot after shot despite being hunted down by the best players in the league. There has not been a pure shooter like him in the history of the game. When he gets into that flow state, it is a shock to see him miss. But the most fascinating aspect of watching Curry play is what he is doing when he doesn’t have the basketball. He has to work like a demon simply to lose the bigger and more powerful players guarding him.

In the NBA finals, the Celtics have rotated their players to guard Curry because it’s an exhausting task: he never stops. They double-team him, they bully him and when Curry is playing defence, they will set screens until he is forced to switch to a bigger player, who can then use his sheer size to bulldoze through him and get to the basket.

The final series has served as a microcosm of what people are watching when they are watching Curry. He’s grown a beard in recent years and muscled up a little but has never shaken off the Peter Pan quality to his game. Exuberance has always been his calling card: he’s a joyous soul, a devout Christian and has turned his physical slightness from an ostensible disadvantage into a rare elusiveness.

He glides and moves through congested, dense forests of height and muscle like a ghost and make shots that often have to be seen in slow motion to be fully understood by the average fan. He is at once respectful and cocky and his habit of celebrating his more outrageous distance shots with impromptu dances and jigs clearly bugs the hell out of his less gifted (but often still very gifted) opponents.

And there has followed Curry the implicit argument that the NBA has tailored its game to suit his needs; that fussy officiating, astronomical fines and a zero-tolerance for the brawling and rows that used to be common occurrences have removed much of the brawn and dark physical punishment from the game. Old greats, led by Michael Jordan, say the right things about Curry but there is an implicit sense that many feel that if he had been faced with the kind of brutal and sometimes thuggish defensive sensibility of the 1980s and 1990s NBA, he would have found himself wincing and gasping and on the floor night after night: that they simply would have broken him up.

It’s an argument that is probably true and which can’t be proven and it was briefly taken up by Draymond Green, the motormouth high-energy lifeforce of the Warriors during a media conference this week.

“The thing that baffles me about the 80s and 90s is that some of the guys who were talking weren’t the guys who were punching people. There were a few guys back then that would lay you out, knock you out and get thrown out of the game. But everybody run around acting like they were that. Y’all were getting bullied! Were there enforcers of that time? Yes. Would they knock you out? Yeah. But the fine was, like, two dollars. I probably get fined a million dollars.”

But the peculiar thing is that some of the hard fouling and body-up defending has returned to the NBA this year. The Celtics transformed their season on that very virtue, developing one of the most tenacious and hard-working defences in the league to make this surprise appearance with wins over the hyped Brooklyn Nets, the defending champions Milwaukee Bucks and the equally hard-nosed Miami Heat.

Boston are the NBA’s old aristocracy, with a record 17 titles. There’s something miraculous about the return of the NBA finals to a proper basketball city. No team fan base can ever predict if and when their time will come around again. So the atmosphere on Wednesday night’s game three, after the first two games in the Warriors’ home court in San Francisco, was about as rowdy as it gets. The crowd was, according to the Celtics fan and podcaster Bill Simmons, “pretty drunk” and they chose for their target Green, chanting obscenities at him for three hours and baying at his every mistake.

“Pretty classy, in front of children. Good job, Boston,” said Klay Thompson, who is Curry’s sharpshooting wing man on the Warriors. And there has always been a sort of Christian folk-group cleanness about the Warriors; it’s not hard to imagine the squad keeping a fine bucket for swear words during practice sessions. Under Steve Kerr, they’ve always presented themselves as a positive force for basketball and in Curry, around whom the team revolves, they have a paragon of exuberant, attractive positivity: a human dazzlement.

But there was a moment, in that game three, as the younger Boston team surged ahead, which told a lot. Jason Tatum, the young play-anywhere-do-anything Celtic who is distinguishing himself as the leading light of the next generation, drove past Curry, laying the ball off the glass backboard at an oblique angle and crashing through the older man as he finished his move.

The slow-mo replays show Tatum wheeling away and Curry giving him a sidelong glance as he chews the protruding mouthguard. His head is slumped and for once, he seems to be walking wearily in the heavy, battered steps of a mortal who has had a long day at the office. It was a flickering acknowledgment to himself that a new wave is coming: that Tatum would be doing this long after he had gone.

In the early hours of this Saturday morning, European time, Curry led his Warriors into the scrap of the season in the hostile environment of the Boston Garden. His ankle had been injured after Horford crashed down on it: he wouldn’t know how much stress it could take until the game started.

Now, the circus heads back to the West Coast, with the best of seven series either level at 2-2 or Curry and the Warriors contemplating the near impossibility of coming back from 3-1 down. If he is to win a fourth title, he will do so by carrying his team. But basketball fans around the world are beginning to realise that this the game has entered the last act in the age of Steph Curry. And it has been an inimitable marvel.