The NBA All-Star Game is coming to Charlotte in February 2017.
That summer, Stephen Curry will be a free agent.
If you thought there was pressure on LeBron James to return to Cleveland — or on Kevin Durant to return to Washington D.C. in the summer of 2016 — wait until you see the questions rain down on Curry in 2017 at the All-Star Game.
Curry’s father Dell was one of the first heroes of the Charlotte Hornets (along with Muggsy Bogues), and Dell is still beloved in that city.
It’s where Stephen Curry grew up, developed that ridiculous quick release and shooting range out to the South Carolina border.
Over at NBC’s SportsWorld site, the incomparable Joe Posnanski delves deep into the Currys and Charlotte.
In his 10 years in Charlotte, (Dell) Curry became the quintessential Hornet. To this day, in team history he has played the most games, scored the most points, made the most field goals, taken the most shots (by almost 3,000), committed the most fouls. And he and his wife Sonya were always around town, too, doing charity stuff, appearing at fundraisers, holding basketball camps. Owning a Curry jersey in Charlotte in those days was practically a city ordinance.
And his oldest son, Steph, came of age in Charlotte right in the middle of the Dell Curry Era…
“He was just this little, small-type kid,” (Steph’s) high school coach, Shonn Brown, would say. “You could see he could already shoot the ball and he understood the game.”
“Tiny,” says Brian Field, who at the time was an assistant coach for Providence Day, one of Charlotte Christian’s rivals. “I mean, he was good — he was one of the better players. But he was so small. He was winging it from the hip because there was no other way for him to get the ball to the rim.”
This is the enduring memory of the young Steph Curry: An almost impossibly small and slight kid firing shots from his side. “He could hoist it up there pretty good,” Brown says. “He had really good accuracy making shots. It was something to see, him making shots from all over the place when he’s just firing it up there with all his might. Well, what would you expect? His father was a shooter.”
It is from there the legend of Curry came — he could play, but not enough to impress Virginia Tech or any of the powerhouse college hoop programs that litter North Carolina. But things were changing. Curry was already working hard on his handles; then he changed that low, slinging shot into the work of art we know today.
And then came the shot change. Steph Curry had developed his side-slinging shot to the point where it was the best high school shot in the city. But in Steph’s junior year, Dell Curry pulled his son aside and told him that he had to move up the release point, that his shot would be too easy to block at the next level. At the time, Dell was an assistant coach at Charlotte Christian, and he told Brown that he was going to guide Steph through the shot transformation. Changing that shot was, in many ways, the toughest thing Steph Curry has done in basketball.
“I made some suggestions,” Brown says. “But then I thought, ‘Why am I getting into this?’ Let the shooter take over. He’s an NBA veteran and a great shooter, and that’s his son. They got after it, I can tell you that. They shot everywhere — at school, at home, at the downtown arena, everywhere.”
Do yourself a favor, go read the entire story — Posnanski is to sports writing what Curry’s shot is to the NBA. It’s more art than practical craft. He tells a great story.
And there are few stories as fun as Stephen Curry’s rise.
