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00:00But conversation we got started on and a good night for it after that road trip after these
00:06performances. Steph had two of, I would say, probably his top 20 most memorable shots literally
00:12happened on this road trip. The three quarter court shot in Orlando, the one at the buzzer
00:17of halftime last night. And the legend only continues to build. And it got me thinking,
00:24man, if this actually were to go somewhere special this summer and the Warriors were to
00:28win another ring and Steph Curry were to do it with his fourth different Robin in five rings
00:35and do it at age 37 and all of this, man, I would, I would lose my hesitation completely.
00:40I'll walk into any barbershop in America and be like, Steph Curry is the greatest player of all
00:45time. And I think that you, again, you're never going to come to a consensus and an answer on
00:51that, but I think you can have that conversation now and not sound ridiculous at all. Let's go to
00:57Will and Marin. Will, thank you for calling. What's up? Hey, thanks for taking my call guys.
01:02Yeah. So Mark, I know that you said that Steph Curry needs possibly another ring. I already
01:07think that he's kind of in the go conversation and it's not even close to it. Like I'm only
01:1236 years old, but in my entire life of watching multiple sports, I've never seen a single man
01:18change an entire league. Like, yes, maybe there's been athletes that have made you approach the
01:23game differently, but, but Steph Curry has literally changed the entire league and the
01:27focus on how a team needs to perform and how they need to play night in and night out. I mean,
01:31there's teams in the league that have no business throwing up threes and they'll still chuck up 40
01:36plus because that's how they know they have to stay in the game. I mean, he just does everything
01:40with so much class. He does it with so much honor and respect. I mean, even when people are in his
01:44face and they bump his shoulder and they give him and they're trash talking him. He doesn't,
01:48he doesn't fall into all that. He doesn't do any of that. He just goes to the three point line
01:52while they're in their face, sinks it, backs up, gives him a little shrug. And like he has that
01:56GOAT mentality. He's absolutely amazing. And I don't even think it's close. And then David,
02:01I got a question for you. I know you said that he's possibly the best hand-eye coordinated
02:05athlete since Tiger Woods. Uh, wouldn't you say that Barry Bonds is probably pretty good at that
02:10category as well? I'll take all of your answers while you're still on the air.
02:15He would be absolutely in that same group, Barry Bonds and the hand-eye coordination. And I guess
02:22since Tiger Woods and you go back to like when Tiger actually was done and Barry Bonds was done
02:29before Tiger was done. Cause Tiger won the masters only like five years ago, I think.
02:34So it's a little bit of semantics that you wanted to do. It is golf, but if you talk about hand-eye
02:41coordinated athletes, it's Tiger, it's Barry Bonds, it's Steph Curry. And I don't even know
02:47who else you would go to because football is not really the same like hand-eye coordinated.
02:52Cause there's so much gross motor that goes into it. Even like Jerry Rice and Randy Moss,
02:57you gotta be fast and strong and able to catch the ball. But the hand-eye coordination that Steph
03:04relies on, and you mentioned it before, 6'2", 6'3", Buck 85, whatever he is, he's not LeBron.
03:12He's not all these other like behemoth, gigantic human beings. He's just an ordinary built human
03:20being. And I know some people actually, and I know they don't think of it as a demerit,
03:24but literally this came across, it was a number of minutes ago. So I can't, I apologize. I can't get
03:30the screen name who sent this, but one of our YouTubers went Steph Curry, the goat,
03:35LOL. He can't even dunk, which first of all, yeah, he can, but he just did this week. He just
03:40did this week, but like you will look at that as a demerit. Oh, Steph Curry can't be the goat.
03:48He can't even dunk with any authority. And my response to that is that's why he's the goat.
03:56That's precisely my point. Like line all of these guys up and at a playground game,
04:04and he's the last one picked. Like you can't look at him and think that he'd have any chance
04:14whatsoever to compete at the same level as these other players, to have the effect on the game
04:21as these other players, because when those other players aren't at their best or whatever,
04:26they would just physically overwhelm people. LeBron does it all the time.
04:30If the three-pointer late in his career is working like it was in that awesome game,
04:34I don't know if you watched it last night, Laker-Knicks overtime, unbelievable watch.
04:39LeBron hits some big threes down the stretch, but if the three ball is not working,
04:45LeBron will just physically push his way into the paint and find a five-footer and knock it down
04:52because he can physically do that. The fact that Steph Curry is a great finisher around the rim
04:57is one of the great mysteries in American theater. How the hell does he do it?
05:04How does he do it? So to me, when I hear that point, I go, that to me pushes me even further
05:10in the direction of greatness because he has so many fewer physical gifts than the
05:15players we're comparing him to. And I'm looking at the all-time NBA scoring list,
05:20and I'm going top to bottom, and I was trying to get to a point where I could find somebody ahead
05:25of him who is not a physical freak. And by freak, I mean somebody who's uniquely athletically
05:32talented, and there's a guy who's one spot ahead of him all-time in points, and he will pass him
05:38in probably three weeks. Jerry West, the logo, 6'3", out of West Virginia. He is next up for
05:47Steph on the all-time points list, and that's what he's listed as. And I stood next to Jerry
05:54West, and I'm 5'8", so when you're 5'8"... I'm 6'2", and I've been next to Jerry. Jerry West
06:02was down there in L.A. all the time. He was up here a bunch, too. I wouldn't say that he's 6'5".
06:06He might be 6'4". Anyway, but go ahead. And again... Jerry West in his time was not an athletic freak
06:14going up against Elgin Baylor and playing alongside and against Lew Alcindor, who became
06:20Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and all the rest of it. And so I'm just looking at other names on the list,
06:24and you've got a bunch of seven-footers. You've got KD. You've got Kobe and Michael. You've got
06:31Karl Malone, who was unguardable. Hakeem Olajuwon, a seven-footer. Oscar Robertson,
06:36who was a unique triple-double before he was actually even a thing. Dominique. Paul Pierce
06:41at 6'7". So all these guys, to your point, are bigger, stronger, more athletic vertically than
06:49Steph Curry, and yet here he is, 26 all-time in points. Yeah, for me, that's the number one
06:54thing I always look at with Steph Curry. I'm like, none of this makes any sense. The shot last night
06:59being the latest example, but with his size, it really does not make any sense that he would be
07:05able to dominate a basketball floor the way he does against the best in the world. Yeah,
07:09Grandy, what do you got? I saw this tweet earlier this week. Steph Curry has played for 40,000
07:15career minutes, and that happened on this road trip, and I saw this at the Twitter account
07:20at Automatic NBA. They're a good follow if you're an NBA fan, but this is most points scored by NBA
07:26players through their 40,000th career minute, and Steph has the fourth most points all time
07:34through their 40,000th career minute, trailing only Michael, Wilt, and Kevin Durant. Damn.
07:42Efficient. Damn. Yep. Damn, and I think the arrival of Jimmy Butler also changed this
07:49conversation in a little bit of a different way because, by the way, as recently as four weeks
07:56ago, I think that we had sort of just decided that we need to sit with the idea that Steph is
08:02now officially on a significant decline, and by the way, I'm not here to now suddenly say that
08:08he's not declining because everybody declines in some sort of a way, right? I mean, he is about to
08:14turn 37 years old, and he was only averaging 22 points a game, but all of a sudden, when the
08:22ingredients in the stew change, now you're getting a completely different Steph Curry and watch him
08:28play over the last month and try to tell me that he's declining. In what area? Where does Steph
08:34Curry in the month of February appear to be declining? Even a little bit. Do you see it
08:40anywhere? Not of late. I don't. No, not since Jimmy's been here. Before that, you saw it because
08:45he didn't have the ability to have as much free space, and he didn't have the ability to, you know,
08:51play a little bit less impactfully all the time. He's shooting the ball a little bit less than he
08:57did last year and less than he did the year before. His percentages, field goal, the same,
09:03three-point, the same, free throw, slightly better, and he's now averaging 24.4 a game,
09:09which his career is 24.7. So, yeah, his decline has been held off a lot by the fact that he has
09:16somebody else to now help him on the floor. I do hear this sort of response, and we just got
09:21one of these come in on the text line. So, you know, appreciate that 650. My only comeback to
09:27the GOAT conversation is that Jordan could literally shut you down on defense. I think
09:32that's a fair response. I think LeBron and Kobe, those players can certainly make that argument as
09:40well, and so that's fair. Then again, I think the end-all, be-all usually in these conversations
09:50is what you do at the end of seasons, and how many rings do you amass, and what do you do when
09:56you get there, and all of those things. And for some reason, and I've always joked about this,
10:02when we look back on Michael Jordan, I think there are a lot of fans who think that he only
10:06went to the playoffs six times. That's it, and he won every single time, and it's not true.
10:11Been eliminated from the playoffs, same way Steph Curry at times has been eliminated from the
10:16playoffs, but kind of a lot less, certainly a lot less in terms of early exits and things like that.
10:23So again, the basis of at least the start of the conversation is what if Steph did get another one?
10:31What if this did go somewhere special? And so you can respond and say, well, he's not as
10:37important on the defensive end of the floor as those other guys. Okay, fair, but bottom line,
10:43he's still the most important player on a bunch of championship teams, and that's the goal,
10:49is to win the championship. And so if he does this with four different number one teammates,
10:55and he does it at 6-2, I don't know what else to say. I don't know what else to say,
11:05other than that he is right there to me, shoulder to shoulder with anybody.
11:09I think that he's right there, but as you start to have the conversation, and you start to really
11:14get into it, I think when you get into eliminating names from the actual who is the GOAT conversation,
11:21he's not the first one out, but he's, I don't think that he's there. I don't think that he,
11:25for me anyway, rises to that ultimate top level of the greatest of all time. And you know,
11:32you mentioned Michael Jordan and his early ousters, and I'm looking at it here, and his first three
11:37years, he took his team to the playoffs, which is something that Steph didn't do. And you know,
11:42you look at some of those Bulls teams when they had basically nobody, and they were one series
11:49out, one series out, one series out. His second year, he averaged 43.7 in the playoffs, and they
11:54got swept in three. So yeah, I mean, Jordan had a hard time getting over Detroit. They couldn't get
12:00by Boston early on. They couldn't get over the hump. Once they did, there was no beating him.
12:06And you know, it took Steph a little bit longer to get rolling. And you know, you can talk about
12:10Clay as his Robin, but until they got Iguodala in that first run, who was the finals MVP,
12:17that's really what put them over the hump in that first year. So I don't know. I mean,
12:21you can do that with all teams. Again, I don't know. Nobody does anything alone.
12:24Everybody needs teammates. You know, it's okay that LeBron passed the ball sometimes with a
12:30couple of seconds left. Jordan did too. Ask Steve Kerr, if Jordan ever passes the ball at the end,
12:35like you don't need to go do it by yourself. So I don't really, you know, to me that, that,
12:40that goes a little too far into the weeds on this stuff. We're never going to get to,
12:45I'm not trying to get to a final answer on it. I'm just, I'm with Shaq, especially
12:52if he wins another one. And to me, he gets eliminated by a lot of people for the very
12:59reason that I put them up there, which is all, well, Steph can't physically do this,
13:04that, or the other. Exactly. Exactly. And, and so when, when everybody says this sentence,
13:11which Shaq used the other night, I think it's more important than what we're giving it credit
13:16for. The sentence is, I've never seen anything like this. I mean, you watch Jordan, you watch
13:22Kobe. I mean, some of those names you're bringing up. I didn't, I didn't watch Jerry West. I didn't
13:27watch Bill Russell, but I watched Tim Duncan. I watch all of this. I've never seen anything like
13:32this. And that, that carries a lot of weight for me. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is what the league
13:40has become and the league has become this in large part because of how easy he makes this look. And
13:47I'm just looking at the numbers from this year, the team that's last in the NBA in threes per game
13:53is shooting 31.6 threes per game in 2015. When the Warriors won the title 31.6 threes,
14:02a game would have been second only Houston shot more threes that year. The Warriors only shot 27
14:06threes a game that first year they won the title. So what has this been? Well, this has been
14:13Steph Curry and clay in an offensive style that shows you, if you have good shooters,
14:20shooting threes is a lot better than shooting mid range. And if you don't have a lot of good
14:24dunkers, then yeah, shoot threes. Because in just 10 years, we've gone from 31.6 threes being second
14:31most. And like Houston shot five more threes a game that year than Cleveland number two. And I
14:37remember thinking about Houston, like, man, he's going to jack it up. He's going to jack it up,
14:41James Hodden and all the rest of them. And now 31.6 threes, you're dead last in just 10 years.
14:48So what has he done? Well, he hasn't single-handedly done that, but he's been the number one driving
14:54force in like how important the three can be. Although tucked into that is a statement that
15:00I wonder, I'd love to ask him if he finds this as a compliment or if it's an under the covers
15:08kind of criticism. Steph Curry, you're the greatest shooter of all time.
15:14I mean, it sounds like a compliment and it is, but my goodness, I can't think of a more incomplete
15:21sentence to describe somebody than Steph Curry. You're the greatest shooter of all time. It's
15:27accurate. He is the greatest shooter of all time, but that's like looking at you and describing your
15:34ear and that's it. I'm like, yeah, yeah. Dan Dibley, he keeps his right, you don't know this,
15:41he keeps his right ear out of the headset when he does a radio show. I don't know how you do
15:47both ears covered. Yeah, I just do. I like symmetry. I don't want the same thing going
15:53into both ears over here. The way I sound with both ears covered, I can't have that. But what
15:59if I dislike it? If someone's like, hey, what's dibs like? Well, he keeps his right ear out of
16:04his headset. If you said I was the best one ear broadcaster in history, I'd be like, that's cool.
16:09That's cool. And like, maybe it's accurate. I don't even know because I haven't met everybody
16:14and what they do with their headset. But like, do you understand what I mean? You're describing
16:19180th of the story. If you tell me that Steph Curry's the greatest shooter of all time. It's
16:25less than 180. Okay, fine. But he's flat out one of the greatest players who's ever put shoes on.
16:32Agreed. He's the gemote. Thank you, Rob Parker. You had me thinking about Mariano Rivera,
16:37the Yankees closer, who many people think is the greatest closer in the history of baseball.
16:43But we don't ever talk about him being one of the best pitchers in baseball
16:47because he was a closer. Now, could he have been a starter? Probably. Would he have been as good
16:53as a starter? Probably not. If Steph Curry played in the 1970s when there was no three point shot,
17:00would Steph Curry been able to have been a good, probably Hall of Fame level player? Absolutely.
17:05But he wouldn't be this good because he was the perfect player at the perfect time for the
17:11evolution of the sport to where the sport itself was ready to embrace analytics. The pace has
17:17quickened. And I do think that the idea of having somebody shoot 40 footers now, if he would have
17:23done that in 1977, he would have been benched. He might have been jailed.