Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors are in the NBA Finals. It’s the culmination of the team taking two full years to reload after their last appearance in the Finals in 2019, and for Curry, this presents the best chance he’s had to earn the first NBA Finals MVP award of his decorated career.
There’s been a lot of discussion about Curry’s legacy and how winning that will impact it, because basketball cannot be about the game itself and has to be about this sort of stuff, instead. Anyway, let’s go to First Take, where the topic of how Curry impacted the game was broached on Wednesday morning. It took quite the turn when Stephen A. Smith decided to make the argument that Michael Jordan actually really hurt the game of basketball by making it more about individuals than teams.
.@stephenasmith says Steph Curry changed basketball for the better, while MJ changed it for the worse.
“Michael Jordan is responsible, as much as anybody, for changing the game for the worse!” pic.twitter.com/XkgDKzFp0l
— First Take (@FirstTake) June 1, 2022
“It’s not Steph Curry’s fault because Steph Curry can shoot,” Smith said. “Steph Curry, people say he changed the game — no, no, he elevated it to a point where it was acceptable because you’re looking for somebody to produce somewhere close in the vicinity of what he does, and what Klay Thompson does to a slightly lesser degree.”
Smith went on to argue that the person who changed basketball in such a way that Curry could come along and elevate it was Mike D’Antoni, who ushered in the era of shooting threes and layups. Then, he decided to bring up Jordan and make the case for why “he’s responsible, as much as anybody, for changing the game for the worse.”
While Smith made clear he does not mean to disrespect the best player of all time, he does believe Jordan’s greatness came at a cost.
“He was so phenomenal that the NBA marketed the individual, the audience gravitated toward the individual, and the game became a bit more individualized, because people wanted to be like Mike,” Smith said.
He brought up the two players who were viewed as the faces of the game just before Jordan — Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — and said that while they were great individuals, they were cogs in a machine where all the players around them were elevated.
“You were thinking team until Jordan elevated it to another level, and from Jordan, then you had the Kobes and the Vince Carters and others that came along thereafter, and the individualization of the sport, particularly because of the money that came with it, became more of a focal point,” Smith said. “So I would tell you Mike D’Antoni in terms of the three-point shooting and making sure to maintain the pace, letting people score so you don’t disrupt the pace, and then Jordan with the individuality, even though obviously he was a team player and the Chicago Bulls were a great team. The marketing of individual. Those two components is what made the game what it is today.”