Ric Bucher: Stephen Curry Has Never Carried the Warriors to a Title, Can't Do It Now

Ric Bucher appeared on Speak For Yourself today for the requisite wordplay and decided to aim his semantics at Stephen Curry, who he believes is incapable of carrying the Golden State Warriors to an NBA championship because the greatest shooter of all time has never carried them to a title. Allow him to take you upon a journey along an avenue of thought cooked up in a lab for maximum sports-debate television impact.

Curry was undoubtably Golden State's best and most productive player in 2015, when the franchise won its first title of this era. But since other players on his team also played well, he apparently cannot be afforded the high honor of having carried a team. One one hand, a person could think so what because Curry's body of work is pretty unimpeachable in all the ways that matter. On the other, people like Bucher are using it against him to prove some sort of nebulous point. And as evidence that Curry can't do it this year, even with his team already on the cusp of the Western Conference Finals.

It seems entirely possible that Curry could play incredible basketball and help his team capture nine wins. All of this terms are open to interpretation, so it's unclear how many points per game he'd have to average to get credit for carrying them. Of course, if Jordan Poole also plays well, which he'll need to in order for the Warriors to hoist the trophy, we can apparently dismiss what Curry did as something less than.

In the end, I am struggling to understand the desire to parse words and argue over dictionary definitions like this. Who honestly and earnestly cares if Curry has carried or a team or if he simply led them. It's not as though his championship rings feature an inscription denoting that didn't do it singlehandedly. Which is sort of the point of team sports: to play as a team.

We all know that Curry is an otherworldly player and is highly decorated. Diving headfirst into semantics in order to suggest some sort of failure, using data points that ended with the Warriors winning crowns, is a choice. Maybe it's interesting. It's definitely not for me.