Stephen Curry shoots during the N.B.A. Finals, in 2015. Photograph by Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty

One of the great Internet finds of last year—for basketball fans, anyway—was Brandon Armstrong’s YouTube channel. In July, 2015, Armstrong, who has played professionally in Spain and in the National Basketball Association Development League, uploaded a twenty-nine-second video in which he imitates the Oklahoma City Thunder’s mercurial point guard, Russell Westbrook. Playing on a hoop with a rim set about eight feet off the ground, he mimics Westbrook’s tilting pull-up jump shots, tomahawk dunks, and lunatic celebrations with hilarious precision. The clip spread on Facebook and got picked up by the Sporting News and ESPN—eventually, it was shared on Twitter by Westbrook himself. Since then, Armstrong has posted dozens more parody videos, featuring impressions of Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, and Shaquille O’Neal, among others, and has been dubbed the N.B.A. Impersonator.

What’s most striking and impressive about the videos is Armstrong’s accuracy in replicating a given player’s shooting form. The jump shot is basketball’s equivalent of a singer’s voice: all are variations on a basic theme (aim, liftoff, release), but no two are identical—and some are so distinctive that they become iconic. So when Armstrong replicates Kevin Martin’s cockeyed spot-ups or Paul Pierce’s splay-legged step-backs, he seems to be not just replicating a signature move but getting at some essence of the man himself.

The jump shot has become so intrinsic to how the game is played that it seems inconceivable that players ever scored without it. Yet, during the sport’s first three decades, the preferred method of putting the ball in the basket required a shooter’s feet to remain planted firmly on the court. In the late nineteen-thirties, players began to experiment with jumping to shoot, and, in the next two decades, the move demonstrated its superiority to the set shot; by the end of the fifties, most college and pro teams included “gunners” on their rosters. Not only did the jump shot establish a pattern for future breaks from orthodoxy—such as the dunk—its emergence and acceptance also solidified an essential fact about the game: few sports serve as well as basketball as a vehicle for individual style. And, arguably, that began with a few mavericks defying accepted wisdom and scoring from the air.

Shawn Fury’s recent book, “Rise and Fire,” explores the “origins, science, and evolution” of the jump shot, from its insubordinate beginnings to its current status as a staple of the game. The book’s first few chapters catalogue the shot’s pioneers, among whom Kenny Sailors, who died recently at the age of ninety-five, is the player most widely credited for its popularization. Sailors led the University of Wyoming Cowboys to the 1943 N.C.A.A. championship, and he was certainly the shot’s most successful early practitioner on the national stage. His jumper, though, had humble beginnings: after being dominated in driveway matchups against his much taller brother, “instead of attempting a set shot Bud could easily block, Kenny jumped and shot,” Fury writes. “Standing there together, both of them realized that shot was something special.”

Charming as the story is—and despite posterity’s preference for a hero on which to pin its accolades—championing a single creator is a bit like attributing the twelve-bar blues to one guitarist. The choice to break with convention and elevate above defenders was likely inevitable from the day that the rules of basketball were laid down. (“Just when you think you’ve found a unique nugget that perhaps unearths the first shooter, four more names of early shooters emerge from the archives,” Fury notes.) Still, there’s a broader resonance to the turn toward personal exceptionalism within basketball’s team concept: jump-shot innovators, literally rising above everyone else, took the risk of doing things differently, bringing individuality to what was already one of the most distinctly American games. At first, the basketball establishment—coaches, administrators, sportswriters—decried the jump shot, claiming that its emphasis on solo play threatened the team-oriented integrity of the sport. “What’s ruining basketball is the jump shot,” Jimmy Breslin wrote, in a piece that Fury quotes. “It requires no team effort. Just a guy who can jump and shoot with made-in-a-laboratory accuracy.”

The slam dunk suffered similar disavowals before being folded into the modern game. In what began as an effort to curtail Lew Alcindor’s dominance, dunking the ball was banned from college hoops from 1967 to 1976. Coincidentally enough, the embargo was lifted the same year that the American Basketball Association, a competitor to the N.B.A., introduced its slam-dunk contest, which served as an official acknowledgment of the entertainment value of what had developed from an unstoppable scoring technique into a creative, almost artistic act.

Two decades before Julius Erving began electrifying crowds with his above-the-rim acrobatics, the jump shot was reconfigured from a disruptive and almost unethical piece of personal grandstanding to an accepted, sanctioned, and teachable element of the sport. As the shot gained prominence, a set of fundamentals emerged: a squared-up, shoulder-width base of the feet; a ninety-degree alignment of the shooting elbow; a “through-the-hoop” follow-through with the wrist. Many players had success adhering to these protocols, and the “pure shooter” tag is often used to describe players who, like Jerry West, possess such a conventionally sound jumper that it becomes, for Shawn Fury and other traditionalists, “the picture of basketball perfection.” But while this rubric still informs how shooting is coached, the attempt at standardization not only denies the shot’s insurrectionist roots, but also ignores the evidence presented by some of its most dominant practitioners.

A particularly informative section of “Rise and Fire” (which is subtitled: “The Rebel”) details the unorthodox approach of Paul Hoover and his Pro Shot Shooting System, which was inspired by the fact that many of the game’s most accurate shooters have entirely ignored the alleged fundamentals of the jump shot. Hoover claims, for instance, that very few N.B.A. three-point specialists square their bodies to the basket on deep jumpers; rather, they turn their feet slightly and lead with their shoulders. Despite the stress on technique, many coaches will concede that the most important factor in developing a dependable jump shot is not uniformity but consistency—essentially, faith in and allegiance to one’s personal style. This might explain why the bandy-armed Reggie Miller, who counterintuitively tended to cross his hands when releasing his jumper, was, nonetheless, one of the deadliest shooters of his era.

Then there’s Larry Bird, to whom “Rise and Fire” dedicates an entire chapter. Although inarguably one of the game’s greatest players, when Bird shot the ball, by Shawn Fury’s own admission, “his feet barely left the court.” If what distinguishes the early practitioners of the jump shot, and the move itself, is the act of jumping, it’s unclear how Bird qualifies for inclusion. He’d be a better subject, perhaps, for Brandon Armstrong, the N.B.A. impersonator, since Bird’s distinctive form was a perfect vehicle for his personality: the almost casual-seeming way he cocked his elbow before letting the ball fly captured his arrogant nonchalance. Similarly, Michael Jordan’s tongue-wagging fade-away jumper showcased a branded swagger that Kobe Bryant has spent his career emulating. And now there’s Stephen Curry, who launches the ball at the basket with freewheeling glee. Curry doesn’t just get any shot he wants, he wants any shot that he gets, seeming to discover and invent the game as he’s playing it. Often, Curry has barely picked up his dribble before the ball leaves his hand, and he releases from such a low shooting pocket—sometimes at his shoulder—that his shot seems just as youthful as his disposition.

It remains to be seen how Curry’s dominance might influence how the game is played and coached, and how a future generation of shooters might approach their craft. Will he inspire, as his former coach Mark Jackson fears, a crop of inferior imitators whose copycat heaves from thirty-five feet will destroy the game as we know it? The pace at which Curry is setting and breaking his own records—he recently obliterated his own mark of two hundred and eighty-six three-pointers in a single season—suggests that he’s either a once-in-a-generation phenomenon or the herald of some basketball evolution. Maybe he’s both. He’s certainly a new kind of shooter, one who doesn’t need to elevate above his opponents to score, and one with a game so particular and unprecedented that even Brandon Armstrong hasn’t quite been able to capture it. Armstrong’s “Steph Curry be like…” video is funny enough, but not as spot-on as most of his other impersonations; the footwork isn’t quite right, nor is the way his body moves. Curry is more lithe, more slippery—more like himself.