Steph Curry’s 2016 MVP may have been unanimous, but it wasn’t even the best season of his career, according to an ESPN ranking of top individual seasons.
Point guard Steph Curry lit up the league in the 2015-16 season, earning unanimous MVP and shattering the 3-point record as he led the Golden State Warriors to a record 73 wins.
ESPN and Kevin Pelton put together a list of the top 74 seasons in NBA history. Unsurprisingly, that Curry year was on it.
What may come as a surprise, though: Not only was it ranked outside the top 30 of all time, it wasn’t even listed as his personal best season.
Curry’s 2015-16 season was ranked as the 36th-best of all time.
His 2014-15 season, in which the Warriors did win the NBA Finals, was ranked No. 18 on the list. Curry’s 2016-17 season made the list at No. 46.
The reason Curry’s 2016 masterpiece wasn’t ranked higher: The Warriors failed to win the Finals.
Tim Botempts wrote:
That the 72-win Warriors eventually lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals has diminished Curry’s brilliance that season, the first and only time in NBA history a player has been unanimously named the league’s MVP.
Pelton wrote about the methodology. Essentially, they used win shares on Basketball Reference to see how a player’s production helped the team in the regular season and playoffs. They also added bonus points for Finals wins and Finals MVPs.
That clearly affected Curry’s ranking in 2016. If Golden State had won the Finals it would have ranked much higher, likely as high as his 2015 season.
Based on regular season stats alone, while 2015 was very good, 2016 was otherworldly.
Curry bumped his scoring up from 23.8 to 30.1 points per game and shot a better 3-point percentage despite three more attempts per game. He joined the exclusive 50-40-90 club in 2016.
He was better during the 2015 postseason though, averaging three more points on a higher field goal percentage than the 2016 playoffs.
The arrival of Steve Kerr coincided with Curry exploding into a human supernova in the 2014-15 season, winning the first of two straight MVP awards and leading Golden State to the first of five straight NBA Finals appearances — and winning the first of the franchise’s three titles.
That earned him a spot in the top 20 seasons of all time in NBA history.
Two Kevin Durant seasons with Golden State made the list. His 2016-17 season was No. 53 and 2017-18 season was No. 55.
Durant’s highest appearance was 2014-15, his MVP season, which earned him the No. 29 spot.
Two other former players of the Warriors organization made the list.
Paul Arizin was listed at No. 71 for his 1955-56 season when the team was located in Philadelphia, and Wilt Chamberlain made the list three times.
Chamberlain’s 1961-62 year, in which he averaged more than 50 points and 48 minutes per game, was No. 48. His 1959-60 rookie season was No. 42.
His 1963-64 San Francisco Warriors season, in which Chamberlain had the second-most win shares in league history, finished No. 6 and was the highest non-championship season on the list.
