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Stephen Curry is currently sidelined by a left shoulder injury, poised to miss at least two-and-a-half more weeks of action. Once the Golden State Warriors superstar returns to the floor, though, rest assured he'll pick up right where he left off in part due to the late-career training regimen that's taken Curry's athleticism to new heights in his mid-thirties.
Curry and his longtime trainer, Brandon Payne, began preparing for his body to slow down with age long before he was a four-time champion. The result? Curry is stronger, faster and more explosive than ever now, breaking Father Time's rule that athleticism inevitably declines in the back half of a professional athlete's career.
“I wasn’t thinking that at 34, he’ll still be getting faster,” Payne told Marcus Thompson II for the story naming Curry The Athletic's NBA Person of the Year. “Nobody would have ever thought even back then that when he’s 35, he’s gonna be stronger and moving faster and better than he moved when he was 23, 24. It’s kind of crazy.”
Payne, obviously, has a vested interest in championing Curry's improved all-around athleticism, but he's hardly the only who sees it. Steve Kerr made similar comments earlier this season while insisting the 14th-year veteran has “never been better.”
“He’s in such great shape. If there’s one area where he’s dramatically better now than when I first got here, it’s his strength and conditioning,” Kerr said of Curry in mid-November. “He’s much bigger and stronger, much more capable of defending at a really high level and sustaining two-way basketball for an entire game.”
You don't need to take the word of Curry's trainer and coach as evidence of that reality, though.
He's shooting 73.7% at the rim this season, an easy career-high. Curry's also making a career-best percentage 58.1% of his shots on drives, better than Jaylen Brown's mark. His 10.6 rebound percentage sets a new high water mark, too. Curry's 1.13 points scored per isolation possession, incredibly, make him a more efficient one-on-one scorer than Zion Williamson, per NBA.com/stats.
Curry has already changed the game forever with his peerless shot-making ability. Could his new level of functional athleticism at 34 prove a similar vanguard for younger players to aspire to going forward? Possibly.
Just like his status as the GOAT shooter, though, don't expect Curry's notorious commitment to his body to be easy to emulate.
