Stephen Curry’s formidable three-pointer record places him among the best shooters in basketball history. Photograph by Ezra Shaw / Getty

A recent fivethirtyeight.com piece made a lengthy statistical argument that the Golden State Warriors—the only N.B.A. team in history to win its first twenty-three games—could be even better if they let Stephen Curry, their very human-looking superman, take even more shots. He already averages twenty attempts per game, which is more than he took last year, when he won the M.V.P. award and led his team to an N.B.A. championship. But then the article makes claims you don’t normally hear, even in the breathless vernacular of sports media: Curry “seems to have figured out that he truly cannot take too many 3-point shots,” he is “fairly immune to defense,” and “so good that he has his own math.”

Other superhumans are taking note. “I know how hard it is to put time in the lab,” N.B.A. Hall of Famer Reggie Miller recently told me, discussing Curry’s extra hours in the gym, “when no one is around and you’re just working on your craft. I understand what he goes through. For him, what we’re seeing are probably easy shots. You’re shaking your head, though. I am, too.”

Last night, Curry took another twenty-three shots and scored another twenty-nine points, as the Warriors notched an easy road win over the Indiana Pacers. (Klay Thompson, the Scottie Pippen to Curry’s Michael Jordan, actually had the hotter hand in the game, scoring thirty-nine. Spraining his ankle in the closing minutes, Thompson may have also provided the handicap teams will need to eventually beat the Warriors.) Golden State is so confident that they celebrate made shots before they go in. Enraptured watchers—which is to say, anyone who likes the game of basketball, and maybe even some who don’t—are beginning to wonder if they’ll lose a game before Christmas, or, heck, Easter.

Miller, who now watches basketball professionally for TNT, where he is a game analyst, thinks it’ll happen sooner than that. In truth, he thought it would happen last night. Miller had publicly guaranteed a victory for his old team, who’ve played well so far this season, with their low-profile star, Paul George, back from a season-ending injury last year. But after the first half, in which the Warriors scored seventy-nine points—just eleven points fewer than this season’s Philadelphia 76ers average over an entire game—Miller was ready to concede. “They are too good,” he told me, watching at home, in Malibu. “They play the best team basketball.”

Miller disagrees, however, with the thesis that this great team could necessarily become greater by giving its star even more shots. “They shouldn’t ask him to take shots outside of their system,” Miller told me. “What makes them great is ball movement and man movement. For him to jack shots up for the sake of jacking them up, that would be against who they are.” But Miller agrees that Curry, who is just twenty-seven years old, is already making a case for all-time N.B.A. greatness.

“He still has a lot of chapters to write,” Miller said, “but, right now, you could certainly consider him among the top five shooters of all time. The streak that Steph has been on since last season rivals the greats of the game. It’s hard to say he’s better than Larry Bird or he’s better than Steve Kerr, his coach, because those guys did it for much longer. But for this short a period he’s in that group. And he keeps improving. If he can beat his own record for most threes in a season, then you’ve got to consider him one of the best ever.”

This may be faint praise, considering Curry’s accomplishments to date. Curry has made one hundred and nineteen three-pointers through a little more than a quarter of the current N.B.A. season; the record, set by him last year, is two hundred and eighty-six threes. He already has three of the top five slots for most ever three-pointers in a season. Miller, widely considered one of the best shooters ever—he held the record for most made threes in a career, until Ray Allen surpassed him, in 2011—only has one season in the top twelve of this statistical category. That doesn’t mean Miller is ready to say Curry is his superior, though.

“All truly great shooters—Dale Ellis, Larry Bird, Craig Hodges, Chris Mullin—we always believed that we were the best shooters in the world,” Miller continued. “So, yeah, I’d take down Steph at my peak. Sure, my form wasn’t as good as his. But it’s all about results, man.” (Bird may not be ready to concede to Curry, either. When asked about Curry’s place among the greatest shooters of all time, this past summer, the Celtics legend responded: “Chris Mullin was pretty good.”) It’s possible that no one’s form is as good as Curry’s. When dribbling, he keeps the ball on an obedient little string; when he finally shoots it, that string is cut with an uncanny swiftness and lightness, a soft but exact flick of the wrist that sends the ball on a seemingly inevitable path to Swish. It’s the sort of stroke that, understandably, inspires early celebration and comparisons to artists in other mediums: John Steinbeck and Robert Rauschenberg, among others.

Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of Curry’s game, other than its Platonic beauty, is that it appears to lack the kind of merciless ferocity that characterized the often brutal genius of Michael Jordan, who, when he wasn’t soaring through the air, punched a teammate or two and trash-talked heckling fans. Curry makes impossible, throat-cutting plays that somehow look both human and imbued with a kind of sweetness, if not mercy.

“What made Jordan so great,” Miller told me, “was that he could get the ball way up in the air and finish it. But you don’t have to dunk to be like Steph. Every kid looks at Steph and thinks: I can shoot and dribble. I can do that. You don’t have to be like Mike anymore. You know, Mike was an asshole. I was an asshole, too. But you don’t have to be an asshole to be successful. Steph is living proof.”