How the obsession with perfection has made Stephen Curry the best player in the conference finals

"My job is to tell the best shooter of all time that what he does is not enough," acknowledged Brandon Payne, personal trainer for Stephen Curry (Akron, 1988), before starting this season.

Payne, the shadow of the Golden State Warriors' star during the summer periods, is more than used to raising the threshold of challenge beyond imagining.

Basically, when the mastery of a resource reaches such exceptional levels, the protagonist stops competing against the rest, no matter how elitist that group may be.

He also stops doing it against history, when it is there, too, his own imprint that marks the path.

And then there is only the strange feeling of competing only against oneself, facing any mental, physical or technical barrier that he is willing to assume.

It happens to Curry with the shot.

He is, in effect, a Martian on earth.

Payne devised, last summer, a training that delved into the magnitude of his message.

A working method in which, in fact, not even scoring shots was enough.

In his plan, the shots had to pass the hoop through its central point avoiding any minimum touch with the iron.

Otherwise, he explained to the ever-hungry Curry, even a basket wouldn't count as hits.

Supported by a state-of-the-art system, with high technology that tracks the movement of the ball, including its arc and where it enters the hoop, he proposed various series of ten shots – standing still or after the bounce – that had to meet the challenge.

And that challenge was not less than perfection, since with each non-perfect shot the account was reset.

“For me – Curry explained to journalist Mark Medina in his day – that was a mental test.

He pushed me to the limit all the time because if I scored just one shot outside the range we wanted, the exercise would end up being lengthy, being endurance.

And no one wants to feel like they're constantly being beaten by a test."

Months later, his Warriors return to the NBA Finals after certifying their reign in the Western Conference.

They do it for the sixth time in eight years, a milestone only within the reach of dynasties of the caliber of the Celtics (in the sixties), Lakers (sixties and eighties) and Bulls (nineties).

They are already doing it in the third phase of a project that knew glory in the middle of the last decade by changing the dominant paradigm of the game, which later perpetuated it by adding Kevin Durant to the cocktail and which now, in full maturity of its hard core, returns at the highest competitive echelon – after two tumultuous absence campaigns – with the insatiable spirit intact.

Along the way, Curry has received the award for the best player in the Conference Finals - an award that debuts this season, as a tribute to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in the West and East respectively -, one more achievement for a fascinating career, projected not both for the bulk of his track record or scope of his records and for the significance of his impact on basketball itself.

Curry, the player who has scored the most triples in NBA history, both in the regular phase and in the playoffs, has taken his virtue to the extreme.

He unites volume and success like no other before, generating a scenario that even disturbs the way in which any defense must face his mark.

Basically altering the very geometry of a field that, with him inside, seems to multiply its dimensions.

Unlike in any previous era, when it was the rim that drew bodies, like earth exerting its gravity, to stop the scoring of either dominating giants (Chamberlain, Abdul-Jabbar, O'Neal) or charging prodigies iron and governed intermediate zones (Jordan, Bryant, James), Curry stretches the defense under its own gravity, taking the shooting range to infinity and posing a different double scenario to the game.

Until his irruption, an unknown one.

On the one hand, his threat is exposed more than eight meters from the basket;

on the other, this one reaches those distances even after dribbling and setting up the shot on him in just half a second.

Circumstances that force not only to cover a greater space of the court, but also make the feeling of danger permanent, increasing the defensive stress.

It's common, but still shocking, to watch Curry double-team 30 yards from the rim.

Perfect sample of the rival psychosis that the simple presence of him generates.

In search of another title -it would be his fourth- and the Finals MVP, which would heal the only open wound in his career, Curry has emerged again, already in his version 3.0, as a museum piece still active, a basketball innovator who has transformed the way of executing, technically and tactically, the sport of the basket.

He has done so by denying that the Warriors dynasty had ended and, incidentally, subtly reminding of the need to value the phases of greatness in history while they are happening.

In a kind of Carpe Diem to his own legend.

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