The star point guard isn’t the biggest, fastest or most athletic player in the NBA. He’s just the pinnacle of the league’s evolution.

By Michael Grange

asketball was revived in the desert on March 21, 2001, and fittingly, it was at a resort called the Phoenician. The NBA version of the game wasn’t exactly dead when a select group of the sport’s elders gathered there to take its pulse. But the patient was under duress and had been for a while. The league was still feeling the effects of the 1998 lockout, and the sport’s beating heart, Michael Jordan, had been retired for three years. Scoring, the game’s lifeblood, was at its lowest ebb since the shot clock was introduced more than 40 years earlier. Viewership for the 2001 Finals—even with the star power of the 76ers’ Allen Iverson and the Shaq-Kobe Lakers—was down nearly 40 percent from the 1998 Finals and Jordan’s (theoretical) farewell. There was no single reason for it, but some were sure that the major factor was the game itself. Speed, skill and flow were gone. In their place was a wrestling match where men built like tree trunks bodychecked cutters and overmatched defenders simply put a forearm into ball-handlers on the perimeter and steered them away from the paint. And all too often someone brave enough to attack the rim would be thrown to the wood like a fighter plane buzzing King Kong.

Watching it all was Jerry Colangelo, one of the modern NBA’s founding fathers. Like almost everyone else he didn’t like where the game was heading, but the difference was that he could do something about it. So he helped usher in new rules and emphasized others, all aimed at opening up the game again. And over time it came to pass that players could pass. And cut. And move and shoot. And attack the basket without fear of being hospitalized. But that wasn’t enough. Change needs champions, and carrying the banner for today’s NBA—the one where the game is played from the outside in and where skill trumps might—is Steph Curry, whose talent and style course through the veins of the Golden State Warriors, the game’s best team. The new rules didn’t create Curry; his is the kind of genius that finds its way to the forefront inevitably and organically. But the changes created a game in which what Curry does best is valued most. And now, 15 years after the sport was redrawn in the desert, the future is here.

Toronto basketball fans got their own full-speed glimpse of what the future looks like in a Dec. 5 game at the Air Canada Centre. The Warriors rolled into town at the peak of their powers, 21-0 on their way to a 24-0 start that smashed records across all the major sports for beginning a season. Curry took to the same court he used to goof around on with his little brother while his father, Dell, played for the Raptors, and looked right at home as he connected on his first three triples, lobbying for an early knockout. But the Raptors weren’t having it. Toronto was up by three with 3:46 left in the fourth quarter when Curry snatched a rebound in the paint, about 85 feet from the Raptors’ basket. He immediately put the ball on the floor to his left and broke into a full sprint. Raptors guard Kyle Lowry hounded him on his right side, and forward Luis Scola, sensing danger, sprinted up from behind. It took Curry less than three seconds to travel the 60 feet to the top of the three-point line at the other end. Upon arrival he slammed on the brakes—even above the crowd of 20,160 you could hear his signature Under Armour shoes screech, pushed to the limit of their traction—as Scola and Lowry flew by, victims of their own momentum. Then Curry rose up straight, without a hint of body lean, and comfortably drilled a 25-footer to tie the game. A minute later he drained another deep three, and Golden State’s streak continued. Afterward, Curry’s Roadrunner-esque triple was the talk of the game. “I was just telling coaches about that exact play in the locker room. It’s incredible,” Warriors interim head coach Luke Walton said. “To go full speed and then stop on a dime with people all around you, and by the time he releases the ball it looks like a normal shot, like he’s just shooting in a gym by himself. It’s such an incredible skill.”

Colangelo couldn’t have known, when he was growing anxious about the state of professional basketball, that someone like Curry would come along and recalibrate how to play it. But he certainly had creating opportunities for skilled players on his mind when he popped into NBA commissioner David Stern’s office and told him he needed to fix the game. Colangelo could get away with that given his standing in the league, which far predated Stern’s. An NCAA star at Illinois, he left a job renting out tuxedos to join the front office of the expansion Chicago Bulls, whose first season was 1966–67. He then moved his family to Arizona to become the youngest general manager in the NBA and launch the Phoenix Suns in 1968. From the beginning, Suns basketball was about pushing the pace and playing a wide-open, flowing style, and it peaked in 1992–93 when the Suns went 62-20 and lost a highly entertaining NBA Finals in six games to Michael Jordan and the Bulls. But by 2001, post-lockout, post-Jordan, the game was dragging and Colangelo didn’t like it. “I said, ‘Dave, we have a problem, because I’m a basketball lifer; when I get turned off on the game, that says something,’” Colangelo explains. “I told him I thought the game had become dull, scoring was down, shooting percentages were down. The game was too physical. There was too much hand-checking, too much isolation-basketball. No one truly understood the defence guidelines. It just was a bad moment for the game and I expressed all of that to him and I told him what needed to happen. And he said, ‘Well, why don’t you form a committee?’”

And so he did. The gathering at the Phoenician was actually one of a series of efforts to lift the game from its doldrums. A couple of years before, Colangelo had served on a committee, chaired by longtime executive Rod Thorn, that tried to eliminate using a forearm to impede ball-handlers and cutters alike. But more needed to be done. This time Colangelo showed them a video with clips of the game in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, and pointed out what had gone wrong. Two key themes emerged. One was that the NBA’s defensive guidelines, a complicated stew of regulations designed to prevent zone coverage in favour of man-to-man, had fostered a ball-deadening version of one-on-one within a five-on-five construct. Defensive players off the ball had to stay in their quadrant unless making a full commitment to double-team the ball. Too often the result was a game of cat and mouse, where one offensive player would isolate himself on the wing against his defender with the eight other players on the court at a distance, literally standing still as precious seconds dripped from the shot clock. Passing and cutting were minimized, and when the cuts came, physicality was maximized.

Adding to the problem was that, as the game evolved from the loosey-goosey, ABA-influenced 1970s, coaching standards had improved. “I remember what practices used to look like,” says Colangelo. “I was appalled. [Coaches] were smoking cigarettes, reading the paper while the players were shooting free throws and maybe playing a little bit of half-court. The coaches just rolled out the balls.”

Part of the mission of a new generation of coaches was figuring out how to stop a new generation of players, including Jordan, who was turning the game on its ear. The Chuck Daly–led Pistons came up with the “Jordan Rules,” which involved a variety of double-teams and a clear directive to put His Airness on the ground with force if they didn’t work—and sometimes even if they did. So began the NBA’s obstructionist era. “Back in the ’90s, you couldn’t move without someone holding, grabbing or chucking or wrassling you,” says Raptors head coach Dwane Casey, who was an assistant coach with the Seattle Supersonics for six seasons beginning in 1993–94. “It was a mud bath.”

Scoring dropped 10 straight years, beginning in 1988–89, when teams averaged 109.2 points a game, bottoming out in the lockout-shortened 1998–99 season at 91.6, with shooting percentages and pace of play following similar declines. After getting the go-ahead from Stern, Colangelo’s committee voted to do away with the league’s defensive guidelines in favour of a simple three-second lane violation, and then cut the amount of time teams had to advance the ball into the front court from 10 seconds to eight, encouraging defences to extend pressure and offences to push the pace. The changes were announced in April and implemented for the 2001–02 season. The results didn’t come instantly, but they signalled a commitment to alter the NBA’s course.

The next significant change came prior to the 2004–05 season, when the NBA announced it would more strictly interpret existing rules against hand-checking—and this time the league was serious. And when Colangelo’s Phoenix Suns signed Steve Nash to be their point guard that same off-season, playing for a little-known former assistant coach named Mike D’Antoni, the league got a demonstration of what was possible.

From his home in the hills of West Virginia, D’Antoni hardly sounds like the man who helped alter the course of basketball history. He certainly didn’t set out to. He arrived at the Suns training camp in 2004, looked at the roster he had to work with and figured out that the best chance he had to make things work was to give Nash, by then recognized as one of the NBA’s most creative offensive players, as much room as possible to operate. That meant spreading out the Suns’ crew of athletic bigs as wide as the court would allow, letting Nash work pick-and-roll magic with Amar’e Stoudemire from the middle of the floor, and otherwise run, run, run. “You have to remember, at the time Shaq was in L.A. and he was dominant, so why not let’s try something different?” says D’Antoni. “Shooting threes and spreading the floor out and getting him away from the basket as much as we can so at least we have a shot at winning. Otherwise we had no shot. He was later traded to Miami and we went with it anyway, but that was a big reason we tried to do something different: the presence of the Lakers. You can’t out-Shaq Shaq.”

D’Antoni’s was a minimalist genius. While other coaches were slowing down their guards so they could call plays, D’Antoni let Nash figure things out on the fly, determining it was better to improvise against a scattered team of defenders than try to execute against a set defence. Their mantra—“Seven Seconds or Less”—referred to their goal of getting shots up in the first seven seconds of the shot clock, when they felt defences were most vulnerable and the most open shots could be had. Where other coaches preached hard fouls and no lay-ups, the Suns fouled less than any other team in the NBA, reasoning that surrendering the odd layup and then turning around and shooting an open three in transition was better than slowing the game, putting the other team on the line for easy points, adding to their own foul totals and attacking a set defence going the other way. And if having one three-point shooter on the floor was good, wasn’t having two or three better?

The results were stunning. With Nash pushing the envelope the Suns proved there was a different way to play winning NBA basketball. Phoenix used 95.9 possessions per contest when the league average was 90.9. They shot 24.7 threes a game when the average was 14.9. It was radical, and it worked: D’Antoni’s Suns went 61-21 (a 33-win improvement over the previous season). In fact, they averaged 58 wins over his four years there, playing fast and scoring in bunches. Depending on your perspective, they were early adopters, exploiting the new rules to their advantage before everyone else caught on, or they were heretics, railing against orthodox thought.

The latter camp always had a simple argument against the D’Antoni approach: His Suns never advanced to an NBA Finals, much less won a title. But their influence was evident. Three-point attempts began inching up incrementally across basketball, as did scoring and pace of play. Then in the 2012 playoffs the Miami Heat, down 2-1 to the Indiana Pacers and missing Chris Bosh due to injury, went to a small-ball lineup, starting Shane Battier at power forward. And it worked. They dispatched the Pacers to make it to the NBA Finals, where they shot 20 threes a game compared to 15 in the regular season. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra sent a text to D’Antoni after they downed the Oklahoma City Thunder for the title: “This one’s for you,” it read. “We climbed the mountaintop.”

It was a thoughtful gesture, but the small-ball, three-point disbelievers could still point to the presence of LeBron James and argue that it was his inimitable substance rather than any style that made champions out of the Heat. In basketball’s march to its modern age there were still barriers to cross. In June of 2015 they were splintered like toothpicks.

Curry is more than an hour removed from the Warriors’ win over the Raptors when he rolls out of his team’s locker room in an all-beige ensemble, right down to the toque. He finished with 44 points and made it look easy, piling one signature game-altering moment onto another. Without a single rim-rattling dunk or even a second in which he’d imposed his physical will on his opponent—the decades-old formula for dominance in the NBA—he’d owned the game. “It’s not like Steph’s dribbling down and shooting parking-lot threes all game,” says Andrew Bogut, Curry’s teammate. “[But] he can sense when it’s [time]… that he can break [open] the game, just destroy the other team’s soul.”

In person, he’s more densely built at six-foot-three than he looks from a distance or on television. His muscle seems like it’s been added by an expert plasterer—slathered on just a little thicker where he needs it. Even so, he doesn’t exude the same coiled physicality common to so many elite professionals. He doesn’t look anything like LeBron or Michael or Magic. In the past the NBA’s best players have had very obvious physical advantages. Curry’s no slouch athletically, but his dominance isn’t reliant on those gifts. And he doesn’t look like someone who would take pleasure ruining an evening for 20,000 fans. But he does. “I enjoy those kinds of nights,” he says. “The ones where the game is on the line and you can step up and make some big shots and help your team get a win. When you have moments to swing the momentum and get your team one step closer to a win, you try to take advantage.”

Along the way to becoming perhaps the NBA’s best player, he’s embodied basketball in its current form—with his and his team’s rise both captured and informed by an ever-growing cache of numbers. Last season, en route to the title, the Warriors led the NBA in scoring (110 points a game), pace of play (98.3 possessions a game) and effective field goal percentage (.540), a stat that accounts for the increased value provided by the three-point shot. Curry himself set an NBA record for threes taken and made—646 and 286, respectively—the threat of his jumper drawing defences further and further away from the paint and opening the floor to cuts, ball movement and dribble penetration. The team also led the league in assists while upping their total number of passes per game to 315.6 (seventh in the NBA) from 246.6 (last in the NBA) the season before.

In the opening stages of their title defence, armed with continuity and the assured confidence supplied by a championship, the Warriors again lead the league in points, pace, assists, and three-pointers made and attempted, surpassing their own standards from their championship season, blowing past any perceived limits, with Curry the driving force. Golden State is rightfully drawing comparisons to the best teams in NBA history and Curry, while defending his league-MVP trophy, has somehow improved. At the pace he set through early January, Curry could make 350 threes this year, which would smash his record by a nearly inconceivable 30 percent. At the same time, Curry has used all the space the threat of his shot creates to drive to the basket more and with better results. So far this year his efficiency in the paint is surpassed only by seven-foot dunk machines like DeAndre Jordan and Hassan Whiteside.

By several measures Curry is in the midst of the best year an NBA player has ever had. The season record for Player Efficiency Rating, a catch-all measure of effectiveness, is 31.8, set by Wilt Chamberlain. After two months Curry was at 33.0. The best-ever mark for Win Shares per 48 minutes is .340, set by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar; as the season headed into its middle third, Curry was at .352. Golden State’s deep bench and dominant play mean Curry doesn’t play enough minutes to challenge historic marks in raw totals, but through Christmas Curry’s 31.7 points per 36 minutes had been surpassed for a full season only by Michael Jordan (once) and Wilt Chamberlain (twice).

“I work at it,” Curry says of his growth, which has made him an early shoo-in for another MVP award and a legitimate candidate for the league’s Most Improved Player award, a previously unfathomable combination. “I put the time in over the summer to try and make that happen, and you’re starting to see the results from that. Obviously we have a long way to go, but I’ve set goals. Being more efficient as a basketball player is what I’m trying to do. I don’t know what those numbers mean, but I’m trying to be more efficient than I was last year and I’m on the right track and I want to keep that going.”

People are flocking to see it. The Warriors are one of the hottest tickets in the NBA, rivalled only by LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers and the Kobe Bryant retirement tour, and hundreds of fans rush to courtside to watch Curry shoot in warm-ups when the gates open about 90 minutes before game time. In Toronto they saw him make six of 10 shots from the black Raptors claw at the ACC, just past half-court. Whenever the Warriors play on national TV, ratings spike.

When Colangelo convened his summit at the Phoenician, this was the end goal: to make the game fun again and get people watching. But did he envision the game the way Curry plays it? The way the Warriors do? Did he really see the future? Yes and no. He hoped for more movement, offensive flair and freedom for ball-handlers. “The objective was to create a more fluid game—not as physical—and easier on the eyes,” says Colangelo.

But Curry and Golden State have pushed the boundaries with their skill. Given the platform, they are in the midst of reshaping the sport. “The game is different than it was 10 year ago, but it’s all within the same structure,” says Colangelo. “But the ability to play the game the way Golden State is playing it… you see the skill level, the shooting, passing. It’s enhanced the game dramatically.”

Curry’s leaving the Air Canada Centre now, having spent an hour after the game doing interviews and meeting with fans, friends, and friends of friends. On his way to the team bus he’s asked if he thinks he could have thrived in a previous era, being clutched and grabbed and held and put on the floor. Would he still be Steph Curry if the game hadn’t changed? He thinks so. He believes in his skill. “Ever since I can remember, [this is] how I’ve played,” he says. “I was always a shooter and worked outside in. Really, this is all I know.”

Curry was just 12 when Colangelo was meeting with Stern—just a kid hucking threes on the floor of the ACC before his dad’s games. As he grew older, major college programs didn’t want him because he was too slight, not obviously athletic enough. He was drafted seventh overall—only five other MVP winners (Nash among them) have been drafted lower in the award’s 60-year history—and is paid far below the league maximum. As his career has taken flight, it took time for the game to come around to him, but now that he seems on the verge of surpassing even what was envisioned by Colangelo and those that altered the game’s course, you wonder: Where will he, and the NBA, go next?

This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Photo credits, from top: Rick Scuteri/AP; Kathy Willens/AP; Noah Graham/Getty