Steph Curry's Spot Amongst the League's Best Passers

Everybody knows Stephen Curry can shoot. Everyone knows he’s got one of the best handles of all time (in the context of how he uses it, maybe even the greatest), that his gravity creates opportunities for his teammates to thrive, and recently he’s gotten a lot of recognition as a defender. There is, however, a best-kept-secret about Curry that a lot of people underwrite because the Warriors’ offense schemes don’t highlight it.

He’s a damn-good passer. Elite, even.

Steph is definitively a top-10 passer in the league, that much is assured. The question becomes, however, is he top 5? It’s debatable, but probably not. When you look at the counting stats, that argument starts to fall apart a little, but there’s been a lot of talk about how assist stats are murky due to the subjectivity of what counts as an assist. When you get into the advanced stats about passing per the NBA’s tracking database on their website, that subjectivity gets a little even more extreme because the qualifiers for “potential assists” and things like that are, well, as unclear as the qualifier for an assist is.

That’s not to say the stats are unreliable. They pretty accurately paint the picture of guys like Chris Paul, Luka Doncic, and Trae Young as up there. However, they don’t do LeBron James justice as he’s in similar veins of the numbers as Steph is, and there’s a relatively clear disparity there given LeBron is one of the best passers to ever play the game.

Assist stats and assist-creation stats of this variety have a tendency to favor star players in heliocentric systems and players who have the ball in their hands constantly. When you look at the NBA’s tracking on points created via assist, the list is dominated by guys who dominate the ball: The top 6 are Chris Paul, James Harden, Trae Young, Luka Doncic, Dejounte Murray, and Darius Garland.

This is the type of bias within the numbers that makes it look via the counting stats that Steph isn’t actually that good. When you contextualize it with facts like Steph having a lower number of average dribbles per touch than Tre Jones or less seconds per touch than Rajon Rondo, it becomes a little more reasonable to see why these numbers are where they are.

So we still haven’t answered the question of where Steph is amongst the league’s best passers. We can establish the baseline that he’s not better than Chris Paul, LeBron James, Luka Doncic, or Nikola Jokic. That’s definitive. Cases can be made for Trae Young, James Harden, Draymond Green, or even Darius Garland being over him, but those guys all have caveats: Young and Garland play with multiple traditional lob threats which gives them higher-percentage shots to assist on, and Harden has the highest isolation frequency in the league which allows him to beat a defender and create more open shots by collapsing defenses. Green is the primary facilitator of the Warriors’ offense, so he has more passing volume that he can work with. This doesn’t mean any of these guys are bad passers: They still make great reads, but Steph has the ability to make those reads as well.

Instead, Steph plays a lot off-ball. There’s been a lot of complaints about it, but he’s very good at it, and why wouldn’t you run plays for something you’re good at? Curry isn’t a stat-chaser, he’s a winner. There’s been a lot of analysis on Curry’s volume and “if he played like X player then he’d have better numbers”. That’s inarguably true because of his one-of-a-kind perimeter efficiency. But the Warriors just don’t play like that.

Regardless of the counting stats, the last few games have shown Steph embracing that playmaker role more freely. He’s been pretty good at it, racking up 7.7 assist per game and turning it over 3.2 times a game. That’s a career-average turnover rate while being a significant improvement on career-average assists. In just this season alone, it’s an improvement over both stats as well. The numbers don’t lie, even if they don’t always tell the truth due to missing context.

Could we comfortably put Steph in the top 5 passers currently in the NBA? Most likely not. Volume does matter at the end of the day. Could he be around the 7 or 8 range? That’s probably the most comfortable spot for him, because he is actually a very good passer still. He definitely ranks within the top 10. It’s time to stop ignoring the fact that Steph is an all-around great player, and give him the respect he deserves for how he’s able to take advantage of his game-warping skills.

(Photo credit: KNBR 680)