Steph Curry scored 44, 31, and 34 points across his last three games, 109 points combined, and only two players in NBA history have scored 30 or more in three straight games at age 38 or older: Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Curry just added his name to that list.
Curry broke the aging-shooter decline curve years ago, well before guards his age were supposed to still be first options on a contender. Now he’s rewriting a second assumption: what a historic week is supposed to look like once it actually happens. These three games settle his production on their own, numbers that only Jordan and LeBron have reached this late in a career, and that comparison runs across the whole league’s history, filtered down to a two-name club. What’s missing is bandwidth, the amount of national attention left over for a story this clean once two bigger ones are already running on the same nights.
The numbers break down game by game.
He opened with 44 against the Timberwolves on Oct. 28, a 119-114 win. Next came 31 in the win over the Lakers days later. Then 34 against the Suns on Nov. 2, in a 116-113 comeback that erased a 17-point deficit after Draymond Green’s third-quarter ejection.
The Warriors have extended their win streak to five games, and that Phoenix game was its signature: down 17 without their best defender, and Curry just kept shooting.
https://twitter.com/NBA/status/2117512498777661652
Somewhere in that same week, a separate streak ended. Curry’s run of 51 consecutive made free throws snapped on a miss during the Phoenix game, and Steve Kerr’s response afterward was almost bored: “Obviously he makes all of those. The law of averages catches up every once in a while.”
That miss is the only blemish on an otherwise clean three games, and it belongs to a different stat than the one this story is actually about.
Widen the frame and the case gets sturdier. Curry’s 115 points through his first four games this season is the most any player 38 or older has scored that early, ahead of Kevin Durant’s previous mark of 94. Different window, same conclusion: a player who is supposed to be declining on schedule keeps missing his cues.
None of this led anything this week, and the competition explains why. Luka Doncic scored 45 and then 42 for the Lakers, including a 138-117 win over Miami on Nov. 2, the same night Curry put up 34 against Phoenix, and Los Angeles improved to 6-2. The 76ers are 7-1, the league’s best record, with Tyrese Maxey breaking out as the reason why.
Those are legitimate stories, not strawmen, and on most weeks either one is a fair top line. This just happened to be the week a 38-year-old also did something only two other players in league history have done, and the calendar only had room for so many headlines.
I’d still put 109 points from a 38-year-old, with Jordan and LeBron as the only company on the list, ahead of either team’s weekly win total.
The attention this week went to Los Angeles and Philadelphia, which is where it usually goes in a league this crowded. Curry’s three games, all 109 points of them, don’t need the spotlight to be true, and the two names next to his on that list aren’t going anywhere either. A 38-year-old just did something Jordan and LeBron are the only other players to have done, and the fact that it happened quietly is the story.
