Steph Curry's Impact Is Still Underrated

On a night where Warriors Twitter was decrying Steph’s performance, a 7/22 from the field outing where he turned the ball over three times, Curry was still the game - not just his team’s - leader in plus-minus at +14. Higher than anyone on the winning Hornets, and higher than any of his teammates. He tacked on 10 assists and 3 steals to 24 points on pretty inefficient shooting. He did not make the right plays down the stretch, but he was still an impactful player on the game despite a myriad of errors.

Curry was playing hard in spite of not finding his rhythm, doing far from phoning it in while struggling from the floor. There were a number of plays where his teammates were able to get open looks just by him moving around the floor and dragging constant defensive attention with him. When he’s cold, teams will still look to him as the focal point. His impact on the game was easy to see when you look at the things he’s been doing since becoming the league’s first unanimous MVP in 2016.

This seems to always be the case for Steph Curry. There has rarely been a time since his first title run that he was not the most impactful player on either his team or in the league, for better or worse. He changed the way defenses have looked, and his influence on the league led to the referees calling less fouls to deflate the scoring he propagated. His impact on the Warriors is pretty obvious via the eye test, but for posterity, there’s some stats that back it up too.

Plus-minus as a statistic is a little wonky and can sometimes be misleading when there aren’t large sample sizes. However, it seems to accurately depict the players who many see as the most impactful, which is why it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone watching the NBA over the past few years that Steph Curry has the highest plus-minus per game since 1996 at +13.8 during… this season. That means on average, when Curry is on the floor for the Warriors, the team is 13.8 points better than their opponent per game.

That might not be super shocking. But what’s really shocking is when we get into the top five leaders in plus-minus per game since the ‘96 season. There’s Steph, obviously, and following closely on his tail at +13.2 is teammates Draymond Green during the 2016 season, when the Dubs went 73-9. The next three, however, are also Steph Curry. 2016 (+13.0), 2017 (+12.8), and 2015 (+11.5) round out the best five best plus-minus per game counts (shoutout @antonin_org on Twitter for gathering the info). That’s some pretty all-time impact.

There’s a myriad of other crazy Curry stats that put him in a league of his own in terms of impact. You could look at his shooting records (most threes in a season at 402, most threes all-time playoffs and regular season combined, set the record for threes in a game before Klay Thompson broke it), his scoring accolades (2 scoring titles, oldest player to drop 50 points and 10 assists in a game, averaged 32ppg at age 32), and even his records without fellow stars (25-1 without Kevin Durant playing during their few years together), but this insane impact is impossible to ignore.

Currently, Steph Curry is the leader for the MVP favorite in spite of a quietly-phenomenal season from Durant, who’s putting up some insane efficiency while leading the league in scoring and leading the Nets to one of the best records in the league. He should have been eligible to be the MVP in 2017, he probably should have been the MVP last year for even making the play-in despite a middling season from Draymond Green and a squad full of G-Leaguers, and who knows about how this season will shake out.

But one thing is clear: Steph’s impact and value is underrated. If it were properly rated, he’d be a top 3 MVP candidate every year since 2015. And you can take that one to the bank.

(Photo credit: Lachlan Cunningham / Getty Images)