Stephen Curry’s Top 5 of All Time Case Is Strong as Ever After 2024 Olympic Gold Medal | News, Scores, Highlights, Stats & Rumors

In the days and hours leading up to Team USA’s 98-87 victory over France in the gold medal game at the 2024 Olympic men’s basketball tournament, an old video of Stephen Curry surfaced and went viral.

“I got to play for Coach (Steve) Kerr in ’24,” Curry told his teammates shortly after winning the 2022 NBA Finals. “I got to get something you guys got that I didn’t.”

Curry was of course referring to the gold medal that his teammates, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, have. And just over two years later, he has fulfilled that wish.

Team USA probably wouldn’t have made it to the championship game without him. The Americans needed all 36 of his points and nine three-pointers in the semifinal against Serbia, which may be the best individual performance in the history of the program.

And when things started to get tense in the final against France, Curry delivered a magnificent performance from behind the three-point line, even considering his own prodigious level.

With 4:23 to play and the USA leading by eight, he missed a three. Less than a minute later, the lead was down to six points and Curry lost the ball. At 3:16, Curry missed again. The lead was down to three points and you could feel the excitement of the French crowd radiating through the screen.

From that point until the final buzzer, Curry made four straight three-pointers, one of which was a fadeaway from far behind the line and over a double-team.

Going into this tournament, Curry had the resume of a top 10-15 player of all time. In fact, he’s been in that mix for a while now. half a decade or so.

Those who were particularly optimistic even had reasonable arguments for choosing him over Magic Johnson as the “best point guard ever” and thus placing him in the top five of all time.

Well, those arguments are even easier to make.

After a slow start to the tournament — he averaged 7.3 points and shot just 25.0 percent through the first four games — Curry emerged as Team USA’s most valuable player in the two most important games, even though he didn’t win the actual Olympic Most Valuable Player trophy (that went to LeBron James, who clearly had a strong case of his own).

He finished Saturday’s gold medal game with 24 points on 8 of 12 long range shots, raising his tournament average to 14.8 points and pushing his three-point percentage to 47.8.

During the most exciting moments of the tournament, Curry proved to be a nuisance.

And if we add another moment like that to his already scandalous resume, we’ll have to talk about that top five again.

It’s tough to break the Michael Jordan-LeBron James battle at the top, but Curry beat LeBron in three different finals and became the leading scorer at the height of the Paris Olympics.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar certainly deserves a seat at the table, as he is arguably the greatest center of all time, a six-time NBA champion, a six-time MVP and the second-leading scorer of all time.

Larry Bird, Shaquille O’Neal, Tim Duncan, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain are also likely to be around this range. Kobe Bryant’s most ardent supporters also have their arguments.

But the question of whether Curry should be considered among the top five players of all time largely depends on your choice between him and Magic.

Shooting is the most important skill in basketball, and Curry is the greatest shooter of all time. Playmaking and passing can elevate teammates in a way that few other skills can, and Magic is perhaps the greatest creator and distributor of all time.

The stats are probably close enough to make the numbers argument a toss-up, though Curry’s numbers recently outpaced Magic’s in a blind poll.

When analyzing the NBA all-time rankings, few things are definitive. Ultimately, it always comes down to analyst or fan preference. Some prefer scoring over passing. Others care more about defense. Others only care about how the looks like when their favorite player is on a roll.

But after Curry’s summer in Paris, one thing is for sure: he has more than earned his place in this discussion.
And somehow it seems like he’s not done yet.