NBA: Steph Curry is why we watch basketball.

Some quick words on the greatest shooter in NBA history, who is finally the sole owner of the all-time record for made three pointers.

I’m not going to pretend that all of this hasn’t been said before. There are as many Stephen Curry articles in the sports world right now as there are Succession articles in the pop culture world.

That’s because Steph, as both a cultural and basketball phenomenon, has changed our world. He’s the reason that the Warriors became the first North American sports franchise to reach 20 million followers on Instagram last month. Under Armour’s executives will likely never take for granted their decision to sign Curry to a sub- $4 million per year contract early in his career.

There are countless incredible articles that have come out in the last 24 hours breaking down the numbers behind Steph’s record-breaking career. My favorite numbers piece is this one from The Athletic’s Marcus Thompson II, where he breaks down every single three Curry has ever made, and lets you sort them by eight different play types. You can see how many of his threes have come off of catch and shoot opportunities, how many have been made in transition, or how many each year have come 28 feet or further from the basket. If you have the time, here’s fifteen minutes of them. All of the numbers on those shots, and all the different ways they’ve been visualized over the years, are mind blowing.

But the numbers can never get to the heart of Steph’s brilliance. What Curry brings to the game is so much more than simply his ability to knock down shots at an unprecedented rate and volume. Warriors fans were reminded of that fact last year, when the two time MVP returned to action after playing just five games in the 2019-20 campaign that saw Golden State bottom out at 15-50, the worst record in the league.

The Ringer’s Dan Devine put it best in a piece last April: “The numbers are incredible, impossible, but the magic is not in the numbers, and it never was.” The numbers we see in the box scores and the record books are a highly imperfect representation of the magic that Curry provides every single time he has a basketball in his hands. We can talk all day about his RAPTOR rating, his estimated plus/minus, his adjusted shooting percentages, his shooting by zone, blah blah blah blah. None of it can convey how much energy and joy Steph brings to the game of basketball.

There are three key elements of Steph’s game that I think convey at least part of why his is such a special force in the game.

The most obvious is his shooting. Curry has helped lead the transformation of basketball from a game dominated by big men in the post to a league where all but two teams this year are attempting at least 30 threes per game, and the Utah Jazz (read more here) are taking almost as many shots beyond the arc as they are inside of it. But it’s not just his volume, it’s the efficiency of Steph’s game that has changed how we think about backcourt offense. Steve Kerr may have the best career three-point percentage at 45%, but he only attempted around 1,600 threes in his 15 years as a player. Steph has attempted almost 7,000 threes over the last 12 years, and he’s knocked them down at a 43% clip. That’s ridiculous.

Steph’s touch, his feel for the ball, is unparalleled in the history of the game. No one else can let go of the ball at half court and have a majority of the people watching think it stands a chance of going in. He can take shots from anywhere on the court with any number of defenders around him and make them look like he’s shooting warmups in Golden State’s practice facility. And when he makes them, he lets us know how much he enjoys it. The Curry shimmy has certainly pissed off plenty of opponents over the years, but for Warriors fans his post-three dancing reminds us just how excited Steph is. to play this game at such a high level. The way I see it, Steph doesn’t dance after his threes to rub it in, he shimmies because he needs a minimally disruptive release valve for the unbridled joy he gets out of making these shots.

Another thing that Steph does is move. Constantly. Here’s a possession from 2019 against the Blazers where you can see exactly how much he runs around the court on and off the ball. And that style is emblematic of how he plays the game. Because of his size, Curry has never been able to just straight up dominate defenders who are almost always bigger and stronger than him. But what he has been able to do is condition himself to the point where he can keep running—nonstop, in different directions and at different speeds—for an entire possession both with the ball in his hands and when someone else is “initiating” the offense.

Curry’s desire to push our conception of good decision making (what a ridiculous sentence) applies just as much to his passing as to his ridiculous shot taking. Steph plays basketball. By this I mean he plays with the ball, both when he’s dribbling in isolation and when he’s passing to a cutter or an open man for a catch and shoot opportunity. He also tries a lot of more ridiculous passes, and a lot of those end up in the stands. But Warriors fans—no matter how frustrating some of those turnovers are—know that those passes are the price we pay for getting to see someone have this much fun playing basketball. And if that means a few extra turnovers per game because Steph thinks he can do something cool and wants to try it, that’s okay with me.

I don’t know whether I ever would have fallen in love with the NBA without Steph and the early “Light Years” Warriors. Curry taught me how the game can be both beautiful and intensely exciting, and I wouldn’t have known any of that without the pure magic and joy that he brings to the game.