Should Stephen Curry‘s shooting slump be a concern for the Golden State Warriors?
Despite Thursday’s red-hot performance in a 124-115 win against the Minnesota Timberwolves (29 points on 10-of-20 shooting, including six 3-pointers in 10 attempts), this has still been Curry’s least efficient full month of his NBA career.
Given the high expectations of contending for another championship the Warriors have generated with their surprisingly strong start, Curry’s performance is back under the microscope. Even with the return of fellow Splash Brother Klay Thompson, Golden State needs Curry performing near MVP caliber to get back to and win the NBA Finals.
This week’s mailbag takes a look at whether Curry’s recent performance should give us pause about his ability to play that well.
Throughout the NBA season, I answer your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
This week’s mailbag also touches on the accuracy of the NBA’s pregame injury reports and the players who have scored the highest percentage of all total points in a single game.
“Is Stephen Curry’s shooting slump unusual for him? Is it something that should change our opinion of the Warriors’ title chances going forward?”
— Andrew
As noted already, the answer to the first question is yes. Not only is this the least efficient month of Curry’s career — based on a minimum of 100 field goal attempts in a month — we have to go back to his early pre-All-Star days to find anything similar.
The most recent month in the bottom 10 by eFG% came at the start of the 2013-14 season, when Curry made his first All-Star appearance. Worse yet, the lowest eFG% for Curry since then came in December 2021 (53%).
One takeaway here is that although Curry has been inconsistent from game to game because of his reliance on 3-point shooting, that generally washes out over the course of a full month. He hasn’t experienced a slump this extended.
My first thought was that teammate Draymond Green‘s injury was a factor in Curry’s slide. Aside from Green’s seven-second “start” in Thompson’s first game back, the two Warriors stars haven’t played together since Jan. 5. For all the evident symbiosis between Curry and Green, that doesn’t really bear out this season. Over the course of 2021-22, Curry has shot slightly better in terms of eFG% with Green on the bench, per NBA Advanced Stats. And Curry shot 16-of-59 (27%) in the three January games he did play with Green.
According to Second Spectrum tracking data, Curry’s shots have been somewhat more difficult in the month of January based on the location, type and distance to nearby defenders. However, this difference only explains about a drop of 2.5 percentage points in eFG as compared to Curry’s scorching November. His eFG% has actually dropped by 14 percentage points since then.
Ultimately, I’m not sure there’s a better explanation than some combination of aging and fatigue. It might not be realistic for Curry, who turns 34 on March 14, to be as efficient as he was last season (and in November) while continuing to carry such a heavy load offensively. That’s where Thompson’s return can help. Curry’s usage rate in January (30%) was also his lowest in a full month since Kevin Durant‘s departure, per Basketball-Reference.com. That should be a positive in the long-term.
Still, I am somewhat lower on Golden State’s title odds than I was a month ago, when I considered the Warriors the favorites in the wake of an impressive Christmas Day win against the Phoenix Suns. It’s not that I think Curry will continue to shoot as poorly as he did in January. It’s more I’m no longer confident he will play as well as he did over the course of the previous 12 months.
Before games, players are listed as “questionable” or “probable,” etc. While I’m sure there is an intended hierarchy of probability, do we have data on how often players who are listed as “questionable” actually end up playing?
— Seth
This model came to the NBA when injury reports were mandated starting during the 2018-19 season, surely because of the league’s embrace of sports gambling partners, but it’s based on the NFL’s weekly pregame status reports, which long predate them. Prior to removing the probable designation in 2016 and redefining the others more vaguely, the NFL had said it should correspond to at least a 75% chance of playing, questionable to a 50% chance, doubtful to a 25% chance or less and out to (obviously) 0% chance.
The NBA has never been so explicit about its injury reports, released multiple times daily with the final update at 8:30 p.m. ET, but the natural assumption is they follow a similar distribution. But, do they? Last year, Jake Flancer — now working in the Houston Rockets’ analytics department — put together an R package to scrape injury reports (released in inconvenient PDF format) and aggregate them.
I was able to cross-reference this season’s injury report data with my own injury database to see how often players were actually available.
The nine “available” players who missed the game and three “out” players who played are not typos. The first group is officially listed as DNP-CD (did not play, coach’s decision), but in my assessment would have played if not for the injury or illness. The three players listed as out were later upgraded to available. Oddly, this happened twice with Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Nov. 26 and Dec. 6); Zeke Nnaji is the other game.
Besides those notes, the big takeaway here is that in practice, probable players nearly always play and doubtful players almost never do. Players who are listed as questionable are closer to a true coin flip to play, with an ever so slight lean toward available.
What’s the record for highest percentage of points scored in a game by a single player?
This question grew out of the discussion of whether Boston Celtics teammates Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown could outscore the Sacramento Kings by themselves in Tuesday’s 128-75 blowout win. (The Kings eventually got the upper hand, 75-66.) The closest I found two teammates had come to outscoring the opponent in the shot-clock era was another Celtics win, albeit a lower-scoring one: Paul Pierce (45) and Eric Williams (11) combined for 56 points while the losing Denver Nuggets combined for 58 on Jan. 24, 2003.
Josh noted that Pierce’s 33% of all points scored in the game was actually a higher proportion than Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game (32%). So let’s take a look at this unconventional leaderboard.
The all-time leader is the reason I previously took out the pre-shot clock era. Playing against a stall, George Mikan’s 15 points weren’t enough as the Lakers lost 19-18 to the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons. But Mikan did have a more legitimate effort the following season, when he scored 61 in a 91-81 win against the Rochester Royals (which did require double-overtime to produce a relatively modern score).
Still, Mikan’s best non-stall effort is topped by Kobe Bryant’s 81-point game, which I would consider the true record-holder. It’s kind of remarkable how low Chamberlain’s 100-point game is on the list. I’m not sure that diminishes the accomplishment, but it does put it in a different context.
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