Stephen Curry and the 6 greatest NBA playoff performances ever
Since 1964, there have been 329 instances where an NBA player scored at least 40 points in a playoff game.
On Monday night, Steph Curry became the 330th when he turned overtime of Game 4 against the Portland Trail Blazers into his own personal dartboard, scoring an NBA record 17 points in the final five minutes in his first appearance since spraining his MCL.
Without risking hyperbole, this game can best be described as "unforgettable." It was unprecedented and surreal and the second-to-last nail in the coffin for Portland's season.
But where does it rank on the all-time scale of greatest playoff performances in league history? Even though compiling such a list is virtually impossible without making a complete fool of oneself, let's try to place it in the proper perspective.
One year after Michael Jordan carved his heart out in the 1993 NBA Finals, Charles Barkley and the Phoenix Suns came back the following year with a vengeance. Well, at least through Game 3 of the first round, when Barkley scored an amazing 56 points on only 31 shots (74.2 percent shooting!) to go along with 14 rebounds, four assists and three steals in a closeout game against the Golden State Warriors.
This performance should be more fondly remembered than it is, but Phoenix was eliminated by the eventual champion Houston Rockets in Round 2, so it's difficult to speak too highly of a game that only led to disappointment.
Without playing another second of NBA basketball, Steph Curry is already cemented as the greatest shooter who ever lived. He'd be a first-ballot Hall of Famer and two-time MVP, with one ring and arguably the most impressive offensive season of all time under his belt. Even if he never made another jump shot ever again, he'd already be considered a legend, the revolutionary driving force who singlehandedly changed the league and lifted it to a more entertaining level.
Thankfully, The Book of Curry still has more blank pages to fill. And on Monday night, he delivered what's perhaps his most notable performance to date: the signature "I'm back" game. There may be some legitimate recency bias here, and, sure, it came against the Trail Blazers in a series nobody ever thought for a second Golden State would lose even without Curry at 100 percent.
But on a visceral level, the shots he made were not of this world. And when you factor in a little bit of context—that this was only Curry's third game since April 16; that he was on a minutes restriction until Shaun Livingston was ejected in the second quarter; that both this ankle and knee had been bothering him—it becomes the signature performance of his career, to date.
Everyone who watched it live will never forget where they were or who they were with. It was a firebomb on national television.
Words don't do a good job of describing just how much of an alien Michael Jordan was during Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals. Just watch these highlights.
LeBron James was only 22 years old when he singlehandedly took down the Detroit Pistons in Game 5 of the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals, scoring 29 of the night's final 30 points and finishing with 48 to his name. It was incredible and, on a technical level, will in all likelihood go down as the single greatest night of his Hall of Fame career.
But no game was ever more big-picture significant than Game 6 of the 2012 Eastern Conference Finals, when a ring-less King strode into Boston, facing elimination against the team that chased him out of Cleveland and down to Miami. To say LeBron's "back was against the wall" would be trite, but there's really no better way to describe it.
Lose that game and there's no telling what happens to his career or place in history. But we don't need to wonder what might've been because in the biggest game of his life, James came out and scored 45 points on 26 shots. For good measure, he grabbed 15 rebounds and dished out four assists. The Heat won the series in seven games and LeBron grabbed his first title a couple weeks later.
This is the literal definition of clutch.
This game doesn't even make any sense. Magic Johnson was a rookie point guard whose team needed him to fill in for an injured Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at center in Game 6 of the freaking finals. So what happened? Oh, not much. The Los Angeles Lakers won, and Johnson finished with 42 points, 15 rebounds and seven assists. He went 14-of-14 from the free-throw line. No big deal. Nothing to see here.
The Chicago Bulls lost this game in double overtime. It was in the first round, long before Jordan was universally accepted as the greatest basketball player who ever lived. But even though it wasn't in the NBA Finals and his own team didn't even win, this game is still perfect, a 63-point coming out party unlike anything the sport will ever see.
It occurred in the Boston Garden, against the 1986 Celtics (a juggernaut that's widely recognized as one of the two or three best teams in basketball history). Jordan missed nearly the entire regular season leading up to it with a broken foot, and, as if foreshadowing an entire career of upping his own greatness, scored the playoff-record 63 points in Game 2, three nights after dropping 49 points in Game 1.
Afterwards, it forced Larry Bird to publicly wonder if he'd just seen God on a basketball court. How can anything ever surpass this?
