Yes, Steph Curry is Still a Point Guard

The media really is the gift that keeps on giving. In an era of position-less basketball ushered in by the success of the Warriors and Steph Curry’s game-warping talent, media pundits and former pros from the NBA and elsewhere have all tried to put their own spin on it. Perhaps one of the more famous around the Twittersphere is Rashad Phillips, a collegiate standout who played at Detroit Mercy in the late 90s/early 2000s. Phillips had a solid overseas career after a brief D-League (the G-League predecessor) stint, playing with a few different teams around Europe until officially retiring in 2010. Since then, he’s been a basketball mind that former and current NBA players alike have looked to.

Phillips is one of the pundits who’s really pushing for more specific categorizations: Instead of 5 positions, there are 12 that are more akin to archetypes of players you’d see in 2k than actual descriptions of what each one’s role is. While he deserves a lot of credit for helping the modern era find some definition in this way, there are some things that just don’t need to be further explained. Phillips recently went onto SLAM’s “No Pump Fakes” podcast, hosted by Ahmad Smith and Theus McBee, to talk the evolution of the game. In that cast, he made claims that Steph Curry did not fit the mold of a traditional point guard.

“Steph Curry has never played point guard his entire career” RP3 said on the pod. “He’s the greatest hybrid guard to ever play the game, but Steph Curry is not the same as Isiah Thomas, they’re different positions. Steph Curry and Magic Johnson are not the same, they’re different positions.”

The segment, which mostly comprises of Rashad Phillips talking about how the game has moved beyond what we’ve traditionally understood it as, sort of makes sense at first. Steph Curry does not, indeed, fit the mold of a traditional point guard. That does not, however, give credence to Phillips’ definitions. Steph Curry is, in fact, a point guard, because he’s the primary ball-handler on his team. He is the best passer aside from Draymond Green on the Warriors. He is the primary playmaker by pure virtue of standing on the court and having five guys with their attention focused on him.

The reason Rashad Phillips and other hoop-heads like him can make the claims they do without being laughed out of a room is because of Steph Curry. He is a point guard, but he’s changed the game and the position so that point guards can also be the team’s best hooper. His ability to score at historically great clips doesn’t disqualify him from the point guard conversation, and he absolutely is in the same category as Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson because like them, he is the lead guard of a championship-class franchise. The separating factor is that he’s a generational scorer while still being able to fulfill the roles and responsibilities of a point guard night in and night out.

I fully understand that Phillips is trying to emphasize how the game has changed through his new positional definitions, but it’s specification instead of a simplification when it should be the latter. The modern NBA puts a heavy emphasis on every player having versatile skills, making narrow archetypes unnecessary. So while Rashad Phillips has the right idea, he is still wrong about Steph Curry being a point guard. There is no need to reinvent the wheel when the wheel works great as-is.

(Photo credit: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)