It wasn’t just Durant’s injury that made the Rockets such favorites, but also the fact that the Warriors point guard Steph Curry, a two-time Most Valuable Player award winner, was having a terrible series. His shooting percentage was dismal. He missed layups and uncontested dunks, committed sloppy turnovers, found himself in constant foul trouble, and, on top of everything else, dislocated a finger on his left (non-shooting) hand. During the first half of Friday night’s game, Curry was nearly catatonic: zero points, three fouls, and only 12 minutes of playing time. Yet the Warriors, thanks to some outstanding contributions from the bench, entered the second half tied for the lead.

Then Wardell Stephen Curry II took over.

In a performance for the ages, Curry scored 33 points in the second half, including 23 points in the fourth quarter, a tally exceeded only by Allen Iverson in the past 20 postseasons. Even more impressive is that Curry scored 16 points during the last five minutes of the game—a total it took the entire Rockets team to equal. There’s no other NBA playoff game in which a player has gone from being so awful to being so unstoppable. Curry was “a complete nonfactor in the game,” his coach, Steve Kerr, said. “And then [he] just completely took over the game on a night when everything was going wrong.” Kerr added, “If that game didn’t personify Steph Curry, I don’t know what did.”

The Warriors won, 118–113, to advance to the Western Conference finals against Portland. The Dubs’ quest for a three-peat—winning three consecutive championships in a row, and their fourth championship in five seasons—goes on.

Read: Why the NBA loves—and fears—Stephen Curry

Steph Curry is the greatest long-range shooter in NBA history. He’s also the best free-throw shooter. But he isn’t the best player in history, and he may not even be the best point guard. Yet what sets Curry apart from almost every other player, past or present—including Michael Jordan and LeBron James—is how he has revolutionized the game.

“Curry is to hoops as armed drones are to war,” Henry Abbott of ESPN The Magazine wrote in 2016. “The range. The unpredictability. The inescapability. He’s destroying defenses that don’t even know it is time to play defense. And now that we know this exists, it’s difficult to imagine the future could possibly look anything like the past.”

To understand Curry’s effect on the game, it’s helpful to know a little bit about the history of the three-point shot in professional basketball. When the three-point shot debuted in the NBA during the 1979–80 season, it was dismissed as a “gimmick.” John MacLeod, a respected coach for the Phoenix Suns, said at the time, “It may change our game at the end of the quarters, but I’m not going to set up plays for guys to bomb from 23 feet. I think that’s very boring basketball.” The Boston Celtics’ legendary coach Red Auerbach put it more bluntly: “We don’t need it. I say leave our game alone.”