Kyrie Irving is outplaying Stephen Curry in these NBA Finals. The Cavaliers’ point guard is the series’ leading scorer at 28 per game, having hit the 30-point mark in each of the past three contests. Irving is outscoring Curry by six points per game while shooting better from the floor (48 percent vs. 42 percent) and about even from three, with similar assist numbers and fewer turnovers.
Kyrie Irving is outplaying the first unanimous MVP in NBA history. Kyrie Irving isn’t Cleveland’s problem — right now, he’s the Golden State Warriors’ problem.
But watching the Finals unfold and exploring how different each point guard’s regular season stacked up leaves you with the impression that Irving and Curry are playing in different leagues with different values.
The point guards play in similar situations: they each thrive within schemes that highly value the three-pointer and feature stars who are essentially point-forwards. Of course, Draymond Green and LeBron James are vastly different — the former averages 15 points per game and is a third option in terms of scoring, the other is a four-time MVP among the best scorers ever. LeBron is far more likely to take a shot than Green. During the regular season, James averaged about 21 shooting possessions per game (accounting for free throws). Green was around 12.
The Warriors’ LeBron, so to speak, is the combination of Green and Klay Thompson. Irving has one devastating offensive teammate, another good one in Kevin Love and role players on the court with him most of the time. Curry has two stars who combine to offer a reasonable facsimile of LeBron (with much better shooting), and role players.
Both Curry and Irving dole out assists at similar rates, and they leverage their teammates’ passing to get help on roughly the same rate of shots. During the regular season, both point guards were assisted on just over half of their threes. (Curry was assisted on two-pointers about twice as frequently as Irving, though.) The point guards also draw fouls at similar rates. Curry is marginally better defender. Both have extraordinary handles, the best in the sport.
The real difference between Curry and Irving, of course, is range. Curry hits shots from the tunnel, while Kyrie hit 32 percent from deep this season. Irving has traditionally been a better shooter than that — he broke the 40 percent last year, his first as something other than a No. 1 option without good passing around him — but he’s not Curry. He’s not close.
This is what separates Curry from Kyrie: Steph is such an incredible shooter that he can take 11 threes per game and hit way, way above average on those. Kyrie only had four fewer shooting possessions per game than Curry this season, but scored more than 10 fewer points per game, all because of the three.
This is Curry’s only real advantage over Kyrie: range. But it’s a huge advantage, and it’s only getting wider as Curry gets more and more emboldened to step out further and more frequently. As it turns out, Curry is making range the most important attribute for modern NBA point guards. He and the Warriors have launched the league into a new age of escalating perimeter emphasis, raising the stakes for all competitors. Curry’s range doesn’t just leave Kyrie behind, but it neutralizes Russell Westbrook’s insane athleticism and speed. It shrinks the allure of Chris Paul’s ineluctable playmaking.
Yet here we are in the NBA Finals, with the worse-shooting Irving outplaying historic Steph and giving Cleveland real hope as we approach Game 6.
The Cavaliers have thrown bodies on bodies at Curry, and Irving has done the best defensive work of his career chasing Steph. There are signs that Curry is some combination of exhausted and nicked-up. (Yes, everyone is exhausted and nicked-up at this point in the season. Can we please allow, however, that a player who took 20 shots per game while playing 79 of them, coming around myriad screens every night and getting bumped and banged while being a comparatively slight player might be especially exhausted and nicked-up at this stage, especially coming off a recent injury?)
Curry is still getting as many looks from deep as ever, and he’s hitting the same amount. The thing is that the Cavaliers haven’t allowed him to expand upon his greatest strength, and they are forcing him to rely more on the weaker parts of his game (finishing inside and passing on the move). That’s why Curry is shooting 44 percent on twos, taking just 6.4 of them per game and racking up 4.4 turnovers per contest. Curry is so good at finding space well beyond the three-point line and hitting those shots that he’s still able to do it with Cleveland keyed on him to an extreme extent. But everything else is lagging.
Over the course of a 7-game series, you’d bet on Curry’s dominance overriding game-to-game fluctuations. Irving is playing no differently than he did in the regular season or first three rounds of the playoffs: he’s just shooting better and more aggressively pulling the trigger from the mid-range and in. (You could make a good case that he’s also wearing Curry out, though Thompson’s spent plenty of time guarding Irving.) Even in these long series, unexpected fluctuations happen. Players find a favorable matchup, a coach’s adjustment in coverage or rotations causes the opponent to scramble and general, unavoidable noise produces unpredictable results.
But over the long-term, the law of averages sustains.. This is why there are relatively few major upsets in the NBA playoffs: best-of-7 series are long, and the math wins out.
Right now, the math says Curry is way more potent than Irving and every other living point guard. But here we are, walking up to a Game 6 where Kyrie has a much stronger case for Finals MVP than does Steph. Curry is driving the NBA into the future, but Irving is proving that all isn’t yet lost for everyone else. (Westbrook made a helluva case to this effect last month, too.) Kyrie isn’t just responsible for giving hope to Cleveland. There must be a dozen starting NBA point guards relishing in Irving’s success, taking mental notes and praying to get their chance to do the same to Curry.
As other teams and superstars try to push the game to its logical limit, know that there are just as many working hard to prevent it. The game always evolves, and what we’re seeing in this playoffs is a direct response to the Warriors’ mutations. It probably won’t work this time, but the blueprint is shaping up. This is Steph Curry’s league, yes. For now.
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This article was written by Tom Ziller from SB Nation and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.
