Now you might say that calling Curry underrated is overdramatic. I mean, how can the guy who won 2 of the last 3 MVP awards (one uniquely awarded unanimously) be underrated. To be clear, I'm not saying Curry hasn't gotten his props over the years. Awards matter, but only when comparing who was the best. Like who was the best last season, who was the best player ever, etc. But they don't really matter when it comes to the debate of who is/are the best player(s) playing right now. Like everything subjective there's no definitive answer, but if you're just talking about basketball, not brand or personality, Curry makes a very strong case for being the best player on the planet right now.

How is he rated? The perception.

Whether in the national media or twitter or a random basketball forum or a sports bar outside of the Bay Area, there is a consensus building among those who follow the NBA that there is a top tier cream of the crop set of superstars in the league consisting of 5 to 7 players:

The order of the list is pretty fluid, but there are couple of notable areas of consistency, at least outside the Bay. LeBron is always, always at the top. I'm not here to argue with that, though I think that it's partly a function of group behavior as it is people's genuine opinion. A way to advance some NBA credibility, like LeBron is obviously #1, duh. Anyone who challenges that "doesn't know what they're talking about" and is immediately laughed out the room.

But I digress.

Another consistent observation: Curry is never ranked higher than 3rd, is more typically ranked 5th or lower, and is way too often not included in the top tier at all.

Bat. Shit. Crazy.

Hell, even among our fan base there is some confusion about who is better, him or KD. As the debate about whether KD is dethroning James moves center stage, and still others will include Westbrook or Harden in that mix, I don't see anyone, whether a Warriors fan or not, ask how Curry gets omitted from that conversation.

So when you start to think about how Curry is rated, these perceptions, collectively, put him near the top, but acknowledge that he's not competing for the top. It's this that makes me claim that Curry is not only underrated, but extremely underrated.

How great is he really?

To be the best you either have to be a winner like Tim Duncan, the hands down best player on a dominating team, or you have to be a gamechanger, as in changing the game of basketball like Wilt Chamberlain, and in this particular moment you probably have to be both.

Let's start with Curry the gamechanger, because it's ridiculously obvious. About half the league is trying to imitate the Warriors style of play. What they're learning is that it's hard to replicate it if you don't have Steph Curry. For those of us who've been Warriors fans for a long time, we know that up-tempo small ball is not new at all, we've just never had a player like Curry to orchestrate it so successfully. When so many teams are abandoning long-held beliefs about what it takes to succeed and adopting a new set of strategic principles, you have to ask why that it is. And all roads lead back to Curry. Other than LeBron, who continues to have a huge impact on the NBA by prompting other great players to band together in order to beat his teams, and the teams built to beat his teams, it's hard to make an argument that any of the other top players are impacting the game the way Curry is.

That leaves winning. Obviously nobody has winning down right now like the Warriors do. In fact, with 254 wins in 3 seasons, no other team has had a 3-year stretch of winning like this, ever. But it's difficult to isolate how big a single player's impact is on winning in a team sport like basketball. The warriors have one of the most talented teams ever assembled, and Curry is a very unselfish player, so he doesn't always dominate traditional stats the way the other players on this list do. Though flawed, the best metrics for isolating this are win shares and win shares per 48 minutes (learn about win shares). Over the past four years Curry has been the biggest winner:

1 Curry 14.90 2 Harden 14.38 3 James 13.20 4 Paul 12.90 5 Durant 12.63 6 Leonard 10.90 7 Westbrook 10.73

win-share average 2013-2017

This is intensified when looking at a 3 year window or 2 year window where Curry's win shares are 15.4 and 15.25, respectively. Now it should be acknowledged that Durant's win shares are deflated because of his injuries, which brings us to win shares per 48 over the same period, which smooths out variance for things like injuries:

1 Durant 0.274 2 Curry 0.265 3 Paul 0.264 4 Leonard 0.235 5 Harden 0.234 6 James 0.232 7 Westbrook 0.217

Here, Curry comes in second. In a 3 year window, he's in first with .278 and Durant second with .267. In a 2 year window they're essentially tied.

Now I don't think these stats tell us who the best player is, but they help solidify how great of a winner Curry is, and when combined with the impact he's having on the game of basketball overall, it becomes very difficult to credibly say that anyone other than LeBron is better than him, including KD.

Hypotheticals

This is the place where the Curry haters feel most comfortable. Pick a scenario that cannot be proven or disproven at this time and criticize him for it.

The first one is that he's a system player. The idea being that if you took Curry and put him on another team he wouldn't be as good. This is very hard to argue against, one because nobody knows for sure how well Steph would perform on other teams, but also because I have to concede that it's partially true. This is a system that emphasizes the talents of smaller players, and at 6-3 Curry is on the shorter side by NBA standards. It seems pretty logical to conclude that Curry wouldn't do as well in a system which played to the strengths of its bigs. However, there's a lot of teams running this system, more every year. Is it hard to imagine that any team who somehow landed Curry wouldn't decide to also tailor their system around him?

Another is that Curry wouldn't have been able to compete in the NBA when the rules were different. This is actually a variation of the first, because the rules were designed to favor bigs more back then. It's again logical to conclude that he wouldn't have done as well. But if you want to debate who the best player is today, the only rules that are relevant are today's rules.

Finally, there's the argument that Curry has so much talent around him he doesn't have to do as much. This one is especially suspect, and often comes from the people who put Westbrook ahead of him, and to a lesser extent Harden and Durant. In OKC you had 3 bonafide superstars together, and they never came close to touching what the Warriors did in 14-16. Still, who among them would trade Harden for Iguodala, Durant for Draymond, Westbrook for Klay?

Curry is the best player in the world right now

I get that for many people saying that is laughable. I also get that as a Warriors fan I'm biased. I also get that definitively making a case for Curry being better than LeBron is difficult. To do so, it takes a lot more words arguing why LeBron's game has fallen off to the point where he's not even a top 3 player anymore, and as I've said several times here that's not what this piece is about.

Instead, this is about how this conversation should be happening, and how those who follow the NBA should take it seriously. No disrespect to Durant, but Curry is the better basketball player right now, which is why Curry draws three defenders away from Durant in the NBA finals. And after Curry and Durant, nobody else is in that particular conversation. So when there's a majority of basketball fans and media types who put Curry behind Harden or Westbrook or Kawhi, it's appropriate to say that Curry is not just underrated, but ridiculously underrated.

Correction: Warriors won 254 games from 14-17 (including playoffs), not 242.