Stephen Curry is an absurdly good outside shooter.
He’s making 4.9 3-pointers per game, which would DEMOLISH the single-season. The difference between Curry’s mark and the second-place season (Curry last year) is greater than the difference between second place and 155th place.
Curry has also made 45.5% of his 3-point attempts – the highest clip among the 140 seasons with the most long-distance attempts per game.
It’s cliché to call these video-game numbers.
It’s also inaccurate.
Who hasn’t hit 15 3s in a 20 minute game with Ray Allen on NBA Live 2003? This so-called “3-point cheese” has been a constant frustration for serious gamers, but as basketball games — in particular, the NBA 2K series, the basketball game — have gotten more realistic and advanced, developers have found ways to mitigate player abuse of three-point shooters.
“Scoring in the paint and 3-point shooting have historically been the toughest areas to properly balance,” says Mike Wang, gameplay director of NBA 2K, adding that fighting 3-point cheese is “always on his mind.”
To that end, he and his team have developed a formula to keep 3-point shooting in check. For example, the game accounts for things like the difficulty of shooting off the dribble and volume shooting fatigue — meaning, if you just run around with your player jacking up shot after shot after doing three spin moves, you’re going to be shooting bricks, even if your player has a super high 3-point rating.
Steph has the 2K guys somewhat stumped for now.
“To be completely honest, we are still looking for ways to better translate his game into NBA 2K,” says Wang. “He’s a ‘rule breaker’ when it comes to jump shooting … he becomes a problem in the video game world where we’ve been trying to train our gamers [to know] that certain types of shots should be rewarded versus others.”
I can’t even imagine a more fitting representation of Curry’s greatness.
