National Basketball Association

Welcome to April Madness, featuring Steph Curry

Updated Jul. 21, 2021 5:34 p.m. ET

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

A warning and an apology to kick off today’s column: I’m pretty certain there will be some significant factual and statistical information omitted from what you are about to read.

But please, it’s not my fault. Because today, I’m writing about Steph Curry, and if I included every record, every landmark, every eye-popping stat that he has been recording lately? Well, there wouldn’t be room for anything else.

"There’s something beautiful about it," Golden State Warriors head coach Steve Kerr told reporters when asked about his star player’s recent form. "It really is an art. Nobody in the history of the game has ever done what he’s doing right now."

Sure, beautiful for Kerr, exhilarating to even the neutrals and truly bewildering for any defender set with the task of stopping Curry from scoring. Good luck with that.

Curry is raining 3-pointers, and there isn't a thing anyone can do about it. He’s swatting away double-teams, and he’s ripping the hearts out of entire teams because there’s something internally destroying about trotting back down the court and knowing you’re powerless to prevent yet another bucket from dropping.

Curry is making a late, late run at the league MVP award, and it’s a discussion that’s going to make people think more deeply about what the title actually means – and how it should be delivered.

For most of the season, the front-runners have been Nikola Jokic (-500 with FOX Bet) and Joel Embiid (+300), with each big man leading his team with power and consistency, dominating on both ends of the floor and different sides of the country.

Either would be worthy, but what about Curry, currently listed at +2000?

Does a three-week stretch of bona fide, relentless, historic profusion trump being your team’s rock and bringing it all season? That’s what the voters will have to decide.

Curry is decimating our concept of realistic expectations. He is doing silly things, and he’s doing them all the time. Making 10 or more 3-pointers in a game is silly, so silly that apart from Curry, only one man – teammate Klay Thompson – has done it at least five times in his career. Curry has done it four times … in the past week.

No one has ever made as many 3s as the 72 Curry has logged in a 10-game stretch. With 49 points Monday against the 76ers to follow 47 Saturday at the Boston Celtics, Curry became the first player age 33 or older to score 45-plus in consecutive games since Michael Jordan did so two decades ago.

Curry also became the first player in NBA history to go 11 straight games scoring 30 or more after age 33, surpassing Kobe Bryant's total. There is still plenty of time left in April, but Curry's five 40-plus games this month have already broken the record for most in a month, formerly held by Bryant and Jordan.

Things are getting a little stat-heavy around here, and you wouldn’t believe how many I've left out.

What about this MVP then?

On FS1's "First Things First," Nick Wright argued that Curry is not — or should not be — in serious consideration for the award, primarily because his run of excellence has been relatively brief.

"I would argue he has got something even more valuable," Wright said. "Going into this season, there was a legitimate question about Steph. Can you put him on a terrible team and he carries them to relevance and playoff contention? He has answered that resoundingly: yes."

However, even in Philadelphia, where Embiid becomes more beloved with each passing year, MVP chants were struck up in support of Curry.

The three-time NBA champion has made it a strange MVP race. For while Curry only burst into life after returning from a tailbone contusion injury at the end of March, this rampant streak has put him above Bradley Beal on the scoring charts. Curry is now averaging 31.4 points per game, thanks to his own brand of "April Madness," in which he has averaged 40.8 each night and is better than 50% accurate from downtown.

Curry’s exploits could add a touch of intrigue to the postseason as well. The Warriors are in contention to move up to eighth or even seventh in the Western Conference standings. Assuming they survive the play-in tournament, facing a red-hot Curry in a playoff series wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of fun.

The conference leaders, the Phoenix Suns and Utah Jazz, have been phenomenal this season, but neither would relish having to survive a Curry shooting barrage. For now, the show looks set to continue, with Curry displaying neither the willingness to nor the likelihood of cooling off.

All of which has left everyone wondering how you do something so provenly difficult yet make it look so easy. The solution, apparently, is by keeping it simple.

"Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. You just play basketball," Curry said. "It’s obviously working."

You think?

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.