The Universe of Discourse

“Steph Curry: fluke or breakthrough” ten years later

(Previously)

Flukes and Breakthroughs

In the NBA 2015–16 season, Steph Curry set the all-time single-season record for three-point field goals, 402, completely crushing the old record of 286. Curry's record still stands.

The New York Times was rather breathless about this:

The record is an outlier that defies most comparisons, but here is one: It is the equivalent of hitting 103 home runs in a Major League Baseball season.

And it is an astonishing feat. But I wrote an article called Steph Curry: fluke or breakthrough? in which I compared Curry's feat with similar feats of the past, including the one implied by the Times, Babe Ruth's 1920 single-season home run record, and concluded:

To make the same comparison as the authors of the Times article, [Ruth's feat] is the equivalent of hitting 136 home runs in a Major League Baseball season.

I also compared Curry's record with Joe Dimaggio's 1941 hitting streak, Bob Beamon's world record long jump at the 1968 Olympic Games, and Takeru Kobayashi's decade-long domination of competitive hot dog eating. I analyzed these as being of two types: mere flukes, which were never repeated, and breakthroughs, in which the athlete discovered a new technique or approach that radically transformed the sport itself. DiMaggio and Beamon's feats, I said, were flukes, but Ruth's and Kobayashi's were breakthroughs.

At the end I asked the obvious question: was Steph Curry's new three-point field goal record a fluke, or a breakthrough? I guessed that it would turn out to have been a breakthrough.

I predicted:

Unless the league tinkers with the rules to prevent it, we might expect the next generation of players to regularly lead the league with 300 or 400 three-point shots in a season. … I think it's likely that we'll see basketball enter a new era of higher offense with more three-point shots, and that future sport historians will look back on this season as a watershed.

I've remarked more than once that I don't like trying to predict the future:

I don't think I'm good at it and I don't think anyone else is. Most people who try don't seem to revisit their old predictions to see if they were correct, or to learn from their past errors, and the people who listen to them never do this.

I don't know much about basketball, but having made a clear prediction, I owe it to myself and my Gentle Readers to revisit the prediction to see if I was correct.

The data

I went to Basketball Reference and pulled their list of the 250 player-seasons with the largest number of three-pointers, then asked Claude to turn it into a chart:

Each dot is one player in one season. Hovering on a dot shows you the player to whom it belongs. The !!x!!-axis shows the year in which each season ended, the !!y!!-axis the number of three-pointers the owner recorded in that season. The blue diamonds are Curry's, gray dots are everyone else's. The vertical blue hairline at the 2015–16 season intersects Curry's all-time record of 402 three-pointers, aftyer which I wrote the original article.

You can see a surprising jump in three-pointers in the three seasons of 1994–95 through 1996–97. In those seasons the league moved the three-point line closer to the basket, moving it back again in 1997–98. In the rest of this article I will ignore these.

The verdict

Was I right when I said the Curry's 402 would turn out to have been a breakthrough? I think yes.

Looking at the dots on the chart, it's quite clear that something changed. Up to 2015, the total of 250 was exceeded just six times: four times by Curry and once each by Ray Allen and Klay Thompson. (Remember we're ignoring 1995–7 when the rules were changed.) But after 2015, that total was achieved 34 times in 10 seasons, by 19 different players.

I got some details wrong. I guessed:

we might expect the next generation of players to regularly lead the league with 300 or 400 three-point shots in a season.

This hasn't happened. Last season Anthony Edwards led the league with 320, but this season's record, 273 by Don Knueppel, is much more typical. Only Curry himself has regularly exceeded 300.

On the other hand, regarding Ruth, I pointed out:

Ruth's innovation was promptly imitated. In 1920, the #2 hitter hit 19 home runs and the #10 hitter hit 11, typical numbers for the nineteen-teens. By 1929, the #10 hitter hit 31 home runs, which would have been record-setting in 1919.

And something like this has happened. This season, the #10 players each hit 224 three-pointers. These would have led the league in all but two years prior to 2012–13. Before Curry, the all-time record was 269 (Ray Allen, 2005–06); two players exceeded that this year and three last year.

Was it “a different game”?

Regarding the decade following the watershed 1920 baseball season, I said:

It was a different game.

And it really seems like this hasn't happened in baskeball. Players are certainly attempting and making more three-point shots, but they haven't taken over the league the way sluggers did in the 1920s.

(Source: Basketball Reference 2015–16 season 2025–26 season)

Total 3PFG attempts are up by 31,729, of which 11,765 succeeded, producing 35,295 points. Total points were up by less than this, 32,823 — the three-pointers are cannibalizing some of the other scoring opportunities.

In 2016 I observed:

Curry didn't get lucky this year; he had 40% more field goals because he made almost 40% more attempts.

I concluded from this that Curry could continue to shoot more three-pointers just by making more attempts, and that other players might similarly shoot more three-pointers by making more attempts. This turned out to be correct. Success rates haven't increased, attempts have. Just looking at attempts is misleading because players seem to be playing fewer games than they were in 2015–16. But the league leaders in three-pointers per game are generally up over 2015–16. In that season, three players averaged over three three-pointers per game (with Curry running away with 5.1). This season, there were 13, and Luka Dončić hit 4.0.

On the other hand

I ended the previous article by saying:

I think it's likely that we'll see basketball enter a new era of higher offense with more three-point shots, and that future sport historians will look back on this season as a watershed.

The reasons I gave still seem solid, and I think this was basically right. Over the last ten years I've read several articles complaining about how reliance the three-point shot is ruining basketball:

• Fuck the Modern NBA
• Basketball is a solved sport

(It's fun to compare this with the similar complaints from the past hundred years about home runs. There was a batch in the 1920s, and then another crop in the years following 1998 when Sosa and McGwire both broke the single-season home-run record.)

And Wikipedia has an article on the three-point revolution with links to recent news articles with titles like “Three-point shooting in the NBA is more extreme than ever” and “The NBA's 3-point craze is only getting crazier”.

The chart was generated by Claude from my design, using data I provided from Basketball Reference. Everything else in this article, including the em-dash, was written entirely by me.

[Other articles in category /games] permanent link