Warriors

Stephen Curry by the Numbers: The Records He Already Owns, and the Ones Still Moving

The three-point record isn't a record any more, it's a category he invented and then left. A permanent page for the numbers, updated as they keep going.

Bay Area Sports Blog Staff · Warriors
Bay Area Sports Blog: Stephen Curry by the Numbers: The Records He Already Owns, and the Ones Still Moving

There's a version of the Stephen Curry argument that gets exhausting, the greatest shooter ever, the most important offensive player of his generation, all of it true and all of it repeated until it stops landing. This page is the other version. Just the numbers, kept straight, updated as they move.

The three-point record. Curry has made 4,248 career three-pointers. He took the all-time lead on 14 December 2021, at Madison Square Garden, when he hit his 2,974th and passed Ray Allen. Sit with those two numbers together for a second. He broke the record, and then made another twelve hundred and seventy on top of it. The record wasn't a finish line, it was a checkpoint he went through at speed.

The gap. The two players closest to him are Damian Lillard at 2,785 and his old running mate Klay Thompson at 2,657. Both are approaching three thousand. Curry is past four thousand. That isn't a lead, it's a different unit of measurement, somebody would need to make thirteen hundred more threes than Lillard has managed in a full career just to draw level.

The 4,000 club. It has one member. Curry became the first player in the history of the sport to reach four thousand career threes, which is the kind of milestone that only exists because one person made it necessary to count that high. When he started, nobody built a leaderboard that went there.

What's still moving. The three-point number obviously, and every game he plays pushes the eventual record further out of reach for whoever comes next. The consecutive-games-with-a-three streak is its own running record and he has broken his own mark more than once. Beyond the shooting, the career totals, points, assists, the franchise records that were Rick Barry's and Wilt's before him, keep climbing as long as he's upright.

What the numbers don't say. They don't say what it did to the sport, which is the part that will matter in fifty years. Every fourteen-year-old pulling up from four feet behind the line is doing it because of him, and the reason NBA offenses look the way they do now is downstream of one player proving the maths worked. That isn't a statistic. It's the actual legacy, and it's already settled regardless of what the the current roster looks like.

The honest caveat. He's thirty-eight, playing a position that punishes thirty-eight, on a roster that has been rebuilt around him twice. The numbers keep going up because he keeps playing, and the day that stops, they stop. Which is why the argument about the front office isn't sentimental, every season he's asked to carry a flawed roster is a season of these numbers spent on a team that couldn't win with them.

This page gets updated as the totals move. The era-level argument is in our column on the end of the era, the history is in the championship history, and the rest is on the Warriors hub.

More coverage: Bay Area Sports section · Bay Area Sports · Bay Area Sports Blog home