From the NYT:

The 6’3″ Golden State Warrior guard can shoot accurately from further out in 3-point range than anybody before him in the game. And he doesn’t need to be open or to set up to be accurate. He just flicks in 27 footers the way others toss up 17 footers. Has he developed a new technique that followers will be able to imitate? Or is he a one-time anomaly?

In general, sports tend to be too conservative in technique, with an overemphasis on elegant restraint rather than sheer distance. Until the later 1990s, for example, pro golfers voluntarily held back their driving distance out of a feeling that it would be in poor taste to play Flog It and Find It.

Except at the very end of British Opens, Jack Nicklaus, for example, seldom hit the ball as hard as he could (above, he’s driving through the green in 1970 on the 357 yard 18th hole at St. Andrews) for complicated reasons that sounded very smart when Jack articulated them in countless interviews.

Today, though, it’s clear that the more effective strategy is usually to bomb the ball off the tee, even at the cost of missing more fairways. Redneck John Dailey won a couple of major championships in the 1990s playing Grip It and Rip It. But when the overwhelmingly superior Tiger Woods came along in 1997, other golfers had to adopt the Dailey philosophy out of a desperate urge to keep up with Woods, which turned out to be quite effective. It sounds dumb, but it plays smart. After all, there are lots of people standing around at golf tournaments to find your errant tee shot for you.

So maybe lots of basketball players could have shot from well over 25 feet before, but they just didn’t because their coaches would have yelled at them for being a ball hog or something.

One possible analogy for Curry would be Babe Ruth and his new technique of hitting home runs: As Ty Cobb, the premier line drive hitter, noted, Ruth had been a pitcher, so he wasn’t told to knock off practicing his upper cut swing and instead groove a traditionally level line drive swing for hitting singles like everybody else. He was just ignored while he practiced hitting long flyballs, with revolutionary results. Within 5 or 10 years after Ruth emerged in 1919, lots of younger players had learned to hit with an upper cut.

So, has Curry developed a new technique that nobody had perfected before (like Ruth), a technique that will become standard, or is he just better at what everybody else already does?

Another possibility is that Curry’s deep shooting might turn out to be a dead end, like Kareem’s skyhook. Abdul-Jabbar is still first all-time in NBA scoring, but virtually nobody today shoots the way he did with so much success for so many years. At the time, it seemed like the future of pro basketball was easy to predict: the past had been, in order, 6’10” George Mikan, 6’11” Bill Russell, 7’1″ Wilt Chamberlain, and 7’2″ Lew Alcindor/Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Thus, it was widely assumed 35 years ago that the future would be 7’4″ Ralph Sampson. But that didn’t happen. Kareem remains an anomaly for height, agility, and durability (the extremely tall tend to break down more than the normal sized).

Kareem is under-rated today because he played deep into the postseason until age 42, so many younger fans mostly remember him as an unexciting elderly player. But the reason he was still playing in the NBA finals in his 40s was because of how great he was in his 20s. Few fans under 55 can remember him at his peak in 1971.

But, weirder, Kareem’s boringly effective hook shot has almost vanished from the game.