Steph Curry says he’s the greatest point guard ever, with a caveat

Steph Curry is the greatest point guard ever, according to Steph Curry.

This is what so many sports media outlets aggregated when a clip from “Gil’s Arena,” the online show hosted by bombastic former NBA guard Gilbert Arenas, was posted Monday morning. Arenas asked Curry: “Are you the greatest point guard ever?”

Finally, it seemed, Curry was entering his Muhammad Ali era, proudly declaring “I am the greatest” wherever he went and to anyone who asked. Yet what many of the write-ups failed to capture was the interesting, and immediate, tone shift in Curry’s response. He needed less than two seconds to confidently tell Arenas “yes,” but then started to say “I have to” before he interrupted himself and repeated his “yes.”

Arenas explained why he thought Curry was the greatest, citing influence on the game: “I can witness and watch every kid trying to be Curry,” Arenas said. The four-time Warriors champion then broke down the debate between himself and Magic Johnson.

“Obviously I have to answer that way,” Curry said.

“To your point, Magic’s resume is ridiculous,” he said. “The fact that we’re even having that conversation — it’s a place I never thought I’d be in… You put me on my own team, I’m going to rep myself for sure.”

Sure, we all know the stories of how no Division I powerhouses wanted him in college, and that he had to shake off an injury-prone tag because his ankles were “like crab meat” at the start of his career. No one thought the kid from Davidson with glass ankles would become appointment television and repeatedly turn the utter destruction of the league’s best, through unguardable three-point barrages, into works of art.

However, Curry is no longer that person. In addition to his four NBA titles, he’s got two MVPs, nine All-Star appearances, nine All-NBA nods, two scoring titles and an appearance on the NBA’s 75th anniversary team. He is, without a doubt, the greatest shooter in NBA history and one of the best the sport will ever see, a label he’s earned by beating other greats. If he retired tomorrow, he would be, at worst, on the league’s Mount Rushmore of point guards. He’s earned the right to talk his s—t, but clearly still isn’t quite comfortable fully doing so.

Is Curry the greatest point guard ever? There will never be an objective answer unless he leads the Warriors on a Bill Russell-era Celtics run to end his career — though even then, there’d be debates about peaks. What could have been objectively answered is how Curry truly feels about himself. His first “yes” to Arenas was certainly a half-step forward in publicly owning his greatness — but his second, interrupted “yes” was a full step back.