The sun has only just risen over the San Gabriel Valley. Already, the gym is alive with sound.

In Los Angeles, on South Fairfax Ave., below where it meets Wilshire Blvd. in the city’s west end, sits the Orthodox Shalhevet High School, a three-story brick and glass private school. Class is still out one morning late in August, but summer’s window is closing. Even before 7:30 a.m., school staff and maintenance workers filter in and out to prep for the new year. This early in the day, they exchange few words between them.

The most noise, and certainly the most action, is found inside two sets of double doors by the school’s rear entrance. Hip-hop pulses through portable speakers set on the gym’s bleachers, and basketballs echo as they pound the floor again and again. Soon, intensity will escalate. Sneakers will squeak on the hardwood. Breathing will become labored. By 7:40, shirts are dotted with sweat.

More than a half-dozen ball players mill about the gym in various roles, one directing drills, others participating as placeholders in them, and others still observing the action. They all exist in the orbit of one man, 25 years old then by exactly four days, wearing the lone piece of NBA apparel on the court.

This is Seth Curry. Not Steph Curry, the better known of the basketball playing brothers, and that is kind of the point. The NBA’s reigning MVP, champion and media darling surely trains hard in the offseason, but there is no way his workouts will ever again be quite like this. If it were Steph Curry inside Shalhevet High School on this morning, there would certainly be more attention paid to what is going on in the gym.

Instead, with little curiosity from those nearby, Seth Curry goes through the drills he must perfect to be considered in the same conversation as his older brother. At first glance, they are similar in likeness, their dark hair cropped short, their faces sharing many features, even their names easy to confuse.

But the brothers are not the same. Steph is much more polished, more outgoing. “Seth is very much to himself and very independent,” Steph says. Even their jumpers, a family hallmark, are launched from different angles; Steph’s beginning low, often appearing as if flicked from his hip, Seth’s release more traditional, shot from up top, high near his head.

In the school’s gym, Seth cuts quickly left and right with the ball, mimicking game situations where he will be challenged to create his own shot. He wears a Sacramento Kings team T-shirt, and there is meaning in that. Curry was a great star in college, an explosive guard and prolific scorer who played much of his NCAA career under Mike Krzyzewski at Duke. His future appeared set … after college, Seth would follow his brother to the NBA, who himself followed behind their father, Dell, a legendary shooter that played 16 seasons with five NBA teams.

Seth’s story, however, is not so linear. Injuries and lost opportunities sent him in revolutions around the NBA, circling the league, even touching down for a time or two, but never sticking the way it was long presumed he would. One day he would be lighting up the NBA’s D-League, so much better than his opponents he didn’t seem to fit in. Then, upon promotion to teams like the Memphis Grizzlies, Cleveland Cavaliers and Phoenix Suns, he would disappear and never see the court. As soon as he arrived in the NBA, sometimes even on the very same day, Curry was always sent right back down.

Photo: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty Images L-R: Seth, Stephen and Dell Curry

It seemed he could not live up to the family basketball legacy. But he would whisper barely a word about what many who observed him wondered, how he was handling it, always being compared to that brother, to that dad. The weight of expectations, they thought, must be unbearable.

He swore he was making his own way in life, that he would succeed in the sport at his own pace, and indeed this summer he has lived up to his word. Following two years journeying through the far reaches of professional basketball, in July Curry signed his first guaranteed contract in the NBA. After he dominated in yet another season at pro basketball’s lower levels, this time a performance so impressive it earned him a spot on the All-NBA Summer League team, the Kings offered Curry a two-year deal worth $2 million.

On the professional scale, it isn’t much, but for Curry it is altogether something different. For the first time he will be afforded the chance to claim his own stake in the NBA, to prove that he belongs and that he was always meant to stay. It will be the truest way he can shake the comparisons, of people rarely measuring him without doing so against the basketball stars, past and present, that share his last name.

Curry often said it never bothered him, that being discussed in the same breath as Steph or Dell was something to cherish. But Curry was always quiet, too, a homebody who liked to keep to himself. How could you tell if it got to him, anyway?

“Being around Seth and how he carried himself, you would never know if it was hard for him or not,” says Curry’s sister, Sydel. “To this day, I still don’t know how he really felt about it.”

Growing up, the games always seemed to end the same on that court, the two buckets behind the Curry home in Charlotte, North Carolina. Steph, older and stronger, would beat on his little brother in basketball, their games spilling into arguments and a familiar routine: Seth, often infuriated over what he felt was his brother’s cheating, heaving the ball far off into the distance. Sometimes, he grew so incensed he would grab the ball and instead bring it into the house in protest.

The two boys were the oldest of three children born to Dell and Sonya Curry, a prominent couple that had set their roots in the Tar Heel state. Dell, who spent a decade of his long NBA career with the Charlotte Hornets, had met Sonya at Virginia Tech, where they were both varsity stars - basketball for him, volleyball for her. Following his retirement, Dell became the color man for Charlotte’s NBA broadcasts, while Sonya ran the Montessori school she and her husband founded years earlier in nearby Huntersville.

Photo: Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images Above: Dell Curry holds Seth, 1993

Steph was born two years before Seth, who was followed four years later by Sydel. By now, you know the family well. Had you turned on most any of the Golden State Warriors’ playoff games last year, there in the stands, always in the focus of network cameras, were the Currys, today’s first family of basketball, relishing Steph’s fairytale ride to the NBA title.

It was the culmination of nearly three decades of firm parenting by Dell and Sonya. They provided their children every opportunity in the world to thrive, but made certain they earned each success along the way.

Seth was the quiet kid of the bunch, piping up most often to crack wise before shying away around those he didn’t know. He was a natural in school, good grades coming easy to him, though his parents always asked him to do the things that were never simple. If he studied just 30 minutes more each day, his mother told him, he could turn his impressive report card into an exemplary one.

He was incredibly perceptive from an early age, always finding the angles in life but sometimes, also, the shortcuts. “If he wanted to do something, he was very determined,” Sonya says. “But he had to be shown the benefit of things. He gave you just enough but wasn’t going to give you that extra.”

As a boy, he developed a competitive streak, and of course there was no greater antagonist in his life than Steph. When Seth would storm away from the court following those games that turned into screaming matches, Steph would have to acquiesce to his younger brother. “It was his way of trying to get under my skin, and it usually worked!” Steph says. “I’d have to give in and give him the (foul) call or whatever he wanted so we could keep playing.”

By high school, Seth was a standout guard at Charlotte Christian, scoring more points in a season than Steph had when he passed through a few years before, but even then it was not easy to escape his older brother’s shadow. One game in 2008, against rival Charlotte Latin, came following Steph’s breakout spring at Davidson, where he captured the attention of the sports world during March Madness with one high-arcing three-pointer after another. The underdog Wildcats stunned their way to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament, losing by just two to eventual champion Kansas. Steph had officially arrived on the national stage.

“ I was a bit of a late bloomer.Honestly, I wasn’t that good. ” — Seth Curry

Back in Charlotte, Seth was left to hear the jeers. His coaches always noticed that Seth loved to play when the crowd was into a game, though on this day the opposing fans chose to narrow their gaze on him. “You’re not Steph-en!” they chanted. “You’re not Steph-en!” Over and again, the words came down on the younger brother. “You could see Seth like, ‘OK, I’m gonna get this going’” says Charlotte Christian coach Shonn Brown. “He didn’t get frustrated; he didn’t say anything. He hit four or five threes on consecutive possessions and he was just looking at the crowd.”

He could score, there was no question about that. But Curry also was, by his own admission, not quite ready then for the next level. “I was a bit of a late bloomer,” he says. “Honestly, I wasn’t that good. I wasn’t one of the best players in the country.” Though he was an offensive force in high school, the rest of his game had yet to mature. Like his brother before him, who went lightly recruited and ended up at a mid-major college, Curry failed to attract interest from the biggest programs in the country.

But he did not go completely overlooked. When Curry was a junior, he was shooting one day in a back gym at Charlotte Christian, pulling up from 28 and 29 feet and letting it fly. He didn’t make every bucket, yet the display caught the eye of Ritchie McKay, the head coach at Virginia’s Liberty University. McKay watched for about eight minutes before he had seen enough. He approached Brown. “I’m offering him,” McKay said.

Curry’s senior season came and went, and while he excelled, leading the Knights to a 21-11 record, scouts and recruiters derided him as the dreaded “tweener,” not a true point guard and too small, at 6’2, to be a capable shooting guard. Only three other schools offered him a scholarship - William & Mary, the Air Force Academy and his brother’s university, Davidson - but Seth chose to stick with the program that had first shown interest. “I thought we were getting a steal,” McKay says.

Curry arrived at Liberty in the fall of 2008 and was an immediate success. He scored 20.2 points per game, most in the entire nation for a college freshman, even though defenses tried every gimmick available to stop him. Opponents doubled Curry, designed entire game plans to deny him the ball, and on many occasions even tried the box-and-one, a so-called “junk” defense created to focus almost entirely on a single opposing player. Nothing seemed to work.

Photo: Sandra Mu/Getty Images Above: Seth Curry represents the United States in a U19 Basketball World Championships match

The Flames went 23-12 that season, good for the second-most wins in the Big South, and in Curry the program had a star to build around. But what Curry needed then to reach his true potential was stronger competition and a bigger stage on which to shine. Since its founding in 1971, Liberty has reached the NCAA tournament only three times, and in fact no Big South team has ever won more than a single March Madness game.

McKay caught wind that Curry was considering a transfer from one of his assistants during the final game of Liberty’s season. Once news broke nationwide, McKay must have received a hundred calls from coaches at major schools across the country, many of them the same men that had paid Curry little mind when he was an upperclassman in high school. “Hey, can we talk to Seth?” they asked McKay. “Can we get his number?”

Suddenly, the decision of where to play was his. Curry chose Duke as the school to finish his college career, because it was close to home but also because the chance to play for Krzyzewski in such a storied program could not be passed over. Curry sat out a season under the NCAA’s transfer rules, returning to game action in the fall of 2010.

At Liberty, he had been the face of his program, but in Durham every player had the potential to become a star, and Curry found others ahead of him in the pecking order. During his first season, when the Blue Devils went 32-5 but failed to reach the Elite Eight, Curry was passed over on the depth chart in favor of guards Kyrie Irving and Nolan Smith. Although he shot nearly 44 percent from deep, Curry averaged only nine points per game, and most of his playing time arrived when Irving was out with an injury.

On campus, other students knew Curry because he was on the basketball team, but this was Duke, an elite private school that churns out CEOs and other prominent alumni with great regularity. Despite his standing in sports, he could live a normal life at school, free from screaming fans trailing him to the cafeteria. For Curry, this often meant laying low, returning after class or practice to his room to watch movies or television. “I’m not really someone who’s always out on the scene going places,” he says. “I’m a homebody. That’s just who I am.”

As a junior, with Irving and Smith both in the NBA, Curry became a starter, splitting backcourt duties with Austin Rivers. He learned quickly how the spotlight shined brighter at Duke than it ever could at Liberty, especially so once the Blue Devils were famously bounced by 15-seed Lehigh in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Curry had a rough game, scoring only seven points on 1-of-9 shooting from the field, “When you’re winning, (Duke) is the best place you can be in the country, by far,” he says. “But when you’re losing, you’re having a bad year, it’s one of the worst because all eyes are on you. There’s pressure.”

Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images

Still, as a senior, Curry was pegged to become the program’s top option on offense, though even this didn’t come easy. He had been suffering from shin splints, and a month before the season began doctors found he had developed a stress fracture in his right leg. Rather than lose the year on a medical redshirt, he decided to play at partial capacity, sitting out many practices to preserve his body for game action.

Even with his ailing legs, the Blue Devils leaned heavily on Curry; he logged more than 32 minutes per game, mostly at shooting guard. Unlike his brother at Davidson before him, Curry was tasked less with distributing than with putting the ball in the hoop, handing out just 1.5 assists per game but also leading the team with an average scoring mark of 17.5 points. “If he wasn’t hurt the whole year,” Krzyzewski says, “I thought he might have been the leading scorer in the country. That’s how good he became.”

Photo: Chuck Liddy/Raleigh News & Observer/MCT via Getty Images

Duke lost to Louisville one game shy of the Final Four, Curry scoring 12 points in his finale, but worse than that Curry required an operation after the season to correct his leg injury. He was already considered undersized for the NBA, but now GMs grew unsure how he would recover from surgery. Ahead of the draft, Curry was unable to work out for teams. His stock was falling, a surprise to those nearest him. “I saw him as someone that could immediately score in the NBA,” says Ryan Kelly, the Los Angeles Lakers forward that played three seasons with Curry at Duke. “I was thinking, ‘Man, some team’s gotta want him as someone to put the ball in the basket.’”

Curry watched the 2013 NBA Draft at home with his family, talking to his agent, Alex Saratsis, throughout the night. The first round passed, and suddenly it was getting late into the second and final round without Curry’s name being called. His recovery notwithstanding, Curry was certain he would be chosen, that picks 45-60 absolutely would not pass without his selection. “I felt like I proved all year I was one of the best players in the country,” he says.

The draft ended, and yet his name was not called. Curry had not been picked, old questions about his size asked again and new ones, about his health, asked for the first time. It was another slight, once more he had been overlooked as a player with a future at the next level of basketball. But it also instilled in Curry a resolve he has been forced to confront at every turn. Nothing in this sport would be given to him. There is no birthright to an NBA career.

He set out as an undrafted free agent, searching for any opportunity to show his worth. “I thought I was an NBA player,” Curry says. “I was going to have to prove myself when I got on the court.”

He could not have known then how long it would take.

Of all the places, of course it would be Oakland. Two months following the draft, after he had been passed over by each of the 27 NBA teams that held a pick in 2013, Curry signed a non-guaranteed deal with the Golden State Warriors. The team was led by a player that was surely no coincidence, Seth’s brother, Steph.

It was a marketing lay-up, the Curry boys united at last, those backyard dreams come to life, but the transaction also placed Seth again in the shade of his older brother.

Rocky Widner/NBAE via Getty Images

As teammates, the Currys would not last. Seth received little playing time in the preseason, and for a scoring guard his 2.6 points per game did not satisfy Golden State. On Oct. 25, just before the regular season began, Seth was waived and sent to the nearby D-League team, the Santa Cruz Warriors.

With the guidance of his father and Saratsis, Curry designed a plan. He would give himself two years to reach the NBA, laboring in D-League outposts for little respect and less pay, honing his skills, before he would consider changing course. If he didn’t secure an NBA guarantee by the fall of 2015, he would take the money available overseas, accepting one of the many lucrative offers he’d received to join clubs in Russia, Spain or any number of other top foreign destinations for American players.

He scored 36 points in his first game for Santa Cruz in 2013, and after just a month he received his first 10-day contract, with Memphis. Curry thought finally he had found a home in Tennessee, a place he would play out the rest of the year and then survey new opportunities after the season. Yet the reality was much more cruel. Curry made his NBA introduction on Jan. 5, 2014, against Detroit, played four minutes, attempted zero shots and recorded no other statistics. The very same night of his debut, the Grizzlies waived him.

Back in Santa Cruz, coach Casey Hill wondered what he would see from Curry upon his return. For every D-League participant, a call-up is the dream. Yet when the NBA doesn’t work, each player has his own response. Some turn off, defeated. Others come back determined, but gun only for their own numbers.

Curry returned to the Warriors during the 2014 NBA D-League Showcase in Reno. Up next on the schedule for Santa Cruz was the Rio Grande Valley Vipers, the much-discussed affiliate of the Houston Rockets that ran teams off the floor with high scores and three-pointers to spare. Curry scored a team-high 27 points, but did not do so at the expense of his teammates. He also dished out eight assists, and Santa Cruz won by 12. “It was like he hadn’t even missed a beat,” says Hill.

Tim Cattera/NBAE via Getty Images

So it went for Curry, who would continue his dominance in the D-League without achieving satisfaction in the NBA. Steph would drop him a line on big game days, making sure his brother knew he and the family had his back, but the encouragement could not change his basketball fortune. In March, the Cavaliers summoned Curry on another 10-day contract offer, and in Cleveland Curry scored his first NBA bucket, a three from the corner against Houston. Yet that was all he would do. The Cavs treated Curry more like a temporary roster fix than a prospect toward its future. His contract was not renewed, and it was back to Santa Cruz once more.

If frustrations boiled over for Curry, if he could not come to terms with his fate just shy of the NBA, he let it show to precisely no one. His parents offered advice. His mother urged him to keep perspective, to know that, no matter the doors it seemed man was closing to him, it was all part of God’s will. “He does internalize his frustrations, but I think they come out in very healthy ways,” says Hill. “He’ll get in the gym, shoot extra shots. Basketball seems to be a very soothing thing for him. Basketball seems to be his equalizer.”

It continued in 2014, when Curry, since traded to the D-League’s Erie (Pa.) BayHawks, flourished again. He averaged 23.8 points per game, and buried an absurd 48.4 percent of his field goals, including 46.7 percent on three-point attempts. “It baffled me that a guy could shoot 46 percent from three and not be in the NBA,” says Kelly. “I don’t care - the (three-point) line’s the same no matter where you are.”

All over again, he was presumed by most to be headed soon to the NBA, never to return to play on the shores of northwestern Pennsylvania. During the spring of 2015, another 10-day contract came, this time with the Suns, and once more it led nowhere. Those short-term contracts began to seem to Curry like an unwinnable game. By the middle of the season, many NBA teams practice as little as possible to conserve energy, and so the chances to learn a system and earn the respect of new teammates and coaches are almost zero. “You get in for a minute, two minutes at the end of the game,” Curry says. “If you play well, it’s the end of the game, so it doesn’t really matter. If you don’t play well, you kind of look bad. It’s a tough situation, but that’s what you sign up for.”

By the end of the season, offers kept pouring in for Curry to play abroad, to make a comfortable six-figure salary and leave his non-glamorous D-League lifestyle behind. He was in a peculiar spot. Curry still felt he had NBA skill; that he never doubted. But he began to wonder whether he would ever get the chance to show it.

Jack Arent/NBAE via Getty Images

With only months left until he would consider overseas bids, Curry suited up once more, this time for the New Orleans Pelicans team in the NBA’s summer league in Las Vegas. He had played in summer league before, a year earlier in Orlando with the Magic, but for his final showcase he came equipped with enhanced skills.

Dogged for years with concerns over his ballhandling, in April Curry began work with Johnny Stephene, a prominent dribbling coach who also happened to be Curry’s former teammate at Liberty. Stephene had worked out NBA stars like Kevin Durant and DeMar DeRozan, though with Curry he had a pupil much smaller in size. Rather than have him wait on the wing or trail a fast break to get open looks, the challenge for Stephene was to improve Curry’s ability to create space on his own. Once he could free himself on the court at the NBA level, he could unleash his deadly jumper.

In gyms across L.A., up to four times each week, Stephene and his crew ran Curry through drill after drill, dribbling off the pick and roll, creating efficient ways for Curry to shift and slide into the paint, always toward the hoop. “A lot of players, there’s a way they want to practice,” Stephene says. “Seth wasn’t one of those players. He never gave me any excuses. He just came into the gym and trusted me.”

Armed with a new handle, Curry broke out in summer league. He received plenty of minutes (33.1 per game), and also the chance to dribble the ball more than he’d had in the past. He darted in and around screens, he found the lane. Once in the paint, he would launch his own attack at the basket or find an open teammate on the perimeter. Oddly, it was his three-point shot that failed him - he shot just 8 of 36 from deep in Las Vegas - but the rest was proof he had rounded out his game. Curry averaged a team-high 24.3 points over six games, and led New Orleans to the summer league semifinals.

Curry was showing the skills NBA teams have never coveted more - the ability for shooters to spread the floor, but also handle the ball and slice to the net. He emerged as one of the brightest offseason stars, and after summer league a handful of teams, including the Pelicans and Warriors, sought Curry’s services.

But another club swooped in at the last hour. In Sacramento, the Kings’ new GM and vice president of basketball operations is one of the franchise’s most beloved players, former center Vlade Divac. Divac made his name in the Californian capital on the great Kings teams of the early 2000s, but before that he played a long career elsewhere. For two seasons in the mid-’90s he was a member of the Hornets, where he played beside a veteran wing named Dell Curry.

Rocky Widner/Getty Images Above: Vlade Divac with Dell Curry

Divac marvelled at the notion, that Seth, who Divac remembered as a baby brought by his dad to practices in Charlotte, was now grown and on Sacramento’s radar as a possible signee. Divac called his old teammate to relay his intrigue, and Dell passed Divac along to Saratsis. Divac had no interest in playing games - he had a need for a third guard, someone to come off the bench and create space behind a backcourt that already included Rajon Rondo and Darren Collison, talented, crafty players but, especially in the case of Rondo, not exceptional outside shooters.

Divac could offer two years at a rate the team could afford. More importantly, he could offer Curry a guarantee. Not more than a half-hour later, Divac’s phone rang. Curry was glad to be a Sacramento King.

He allowed himself a small moment of reflection, though as usual the real emotion of his signing was displayed not by Curry but by those closest to him. His friends and family rejoiced. “I was so excited and proud of him,” Steph says. Sonya found her eyes welling up for a full two days after, no matter if Seth kept true to his form, sharing with her the good news but only doing so by text message. “I still can’t talk a lot about it,” his mother says. “My voice is getting kind of shaky now.”

The comparisons are not likely to stop because Curry has captured his NBA dream. They can only become more pronounced now, more direct, the line more easily drawn between Curry’s accomplishments in a league in which his father and brother have produced so much.

And yet the truth has always been this: it all matters little to Curry. He has forever been able to block out the pressure, to retreat within himself whenever outsiders wanted to stack Seth up against Steph or Dell. “I never compared myself to what my dad did or what Stephen did,” Seth says. “I’m just me. I know the opportunities I have. I know what I want to accomplish.” Adds Krzyzewski: “Seth is his own man. Seth is very comfortable with Seth.”

That doesn’t mean there is nothing left to show. If the real work in basketball started following his final season at Duke, it is amplified now, the expectations attached a guaranteed NBA contract realer than what Curry has ever faced before. “He’s finally recognized for his work and talent,” says Divac. “Now, he has even more pressure to prove it.”

On the Kings, Curry will start the season as a reserve, learning his NBA craft in limited minutes. Those that have played alongside him expect Curry to be hungry. “This isn’t like an, ‘Oh, now I’ve made it’ thing,” says Mason Plumlee, the Portland Trail Blazers center and another teammate from Duke. “He’s looking to make an impact with the team. He’s a guy that’s always onto the next thing. He’s never satisfied with where he’s at.”

“ I’m just me. I know the opportunities I have. I know what I want to accomplish. ” —Seth Curry

Every game will mean plenty to Curry, but of course there will also be circles on his calendar. On Nov. 23, Sacramento plays Charlotte in North Carolina, where Dell will sit courtside, calling the action for the Hornets’ broadcast. Seth always got a kick when Dell would call his brother’s games in years past and refer to Steph as “Curry” on the air. Seth forecasts no favorable treatment in his dad’s analysis of him. “He won’t rip me,” Seth says, “but he’ll be honest.”

For the Curry family, the biggest date this fall will be seven games into the year, when the Kings host the Warriors for the teams’ first matchup of the season. It’s hardly a far trip - Seth’s new rented townhouse in Sacramento is just 75 minutes or so from Steph’s home in the Bay Area - but it will be the end of a much longer journey. For the first time, after so many childhood scraps and epic H-O-R-S-E matches, Seth will suit up in real competition against his brother.

Already, relatives have begun chiding Steph, teasing that they will show up to the game wearing only Kings gear in support of Seth. Never before has the boys’ grandmother, Dell’s mother Juanita, visited California to watch either grandson play. But on Nov. 7, she plans to be in the stands in Sacramento.

It will be a special matchup. For Seth, it will also be an incredible challenge. At times, he will have to guard his older brother, the owner of what may be the NBA’s best handle and what is certainly its best shot. “I know everything about him,” Seth says. “But that’s still tough, obviously.”

Photo: Steve Yeater/NBAE via Getty Images

Their bond has never been stronger. These past few years, as Seth has supported Steph as he rose to superstardom, and Steph has supported Seth as he grit his way toward the NBA, have especially drawn them closer. They are forever brothers, but they have also developed into great friends today, too. “We talk a lot,” Steph says, “and mostly it’s about things other than basketball.” Seth will sidestep comparisons to his brother and father on the court, however he will not run from them entirely. For the Kings, Seth will wear No. 30, just like Steph, just like Dell before him.

Back in Los Angeles last month, Curry is shown footage of his morning workout, which was filmed for a documentary being produced on his work with Stephene. Curry’s trainers and associates whoop and roar with delight over the visuals, each ‘round-the-back dribble or up-and-under lay-in more dynamic than the last. Curry smirks, but otherwise sits unmoved as the video plays.

They are, after all, techniques he must use with regularity in the NBA, where size and speed will be against him. It is a league in which he is still unproven, but he has at least shown he is still not satisfied with his game. During shooting drills on this morning, Curry is such a perfectionist that even three misses in a row is occasion to curse himself out.

Past the double doors, in the lobby of the school outside the gym, a curious few gather. An older man in slacks and a yarmulke cranes his neck to peer through the glass windows that lead to the court.

Word has spread that the brother of Steph Curry, the NBA’s most valuable player, is in the gym training. The man cups a hand to his eyes to better his view, scanning the floor where a group of tall, athletic men hustle about.

“Which one is he?” the man asks.

Seth Curry has arrived in the NBA. Now it is time to make himself known.