The Duke basketball program’s long list of NBA products this decade includes a record-holding shooter.
Numbers often lie. That said, Seth Curry is the truth. As a senior guard for a 2012-13 Duke basketball squad that lacked supreme talent, the 6-foot-2, 185-pound sniper averaged 17.2 points while shooting 43.8 percent from downtown and came up only one win shy of the Final Four.
This season, after inking a four-year, $32 million deal in July to return from the Portland Trail Blazers to the Dallas Mavericks — where during the 2016-17 season he put up his loftiest stats as a pro, averaging 12.8 points across 29.0 minutes per game — Curry has been money for a 19-9 squad with realistic championship aspirations.
Following his mediocre start — due to cutting two of his fingers at his house in the aftermath of the monster tornado that hit Dallas in late October — Curry has averaged just shy of an Andrew Jackson across his past five outings. He’s done so despite averaging only 24.8 minutes during the stretch, which began with his season-high 30 points in a 122-111 win at the Detroit Pistons on Dec. 12.
In his latest outing, on the road against the Philadelphia 76ers on Friday night, Curry had a quiet start. He did heat up, though, accounting for all of the Mavericks’ offense late in the third quarter and early in the fourth, scoring 11 straight points for his team — his game total — sparking a 117-98 win.
The 29-year-old is now averaging an Alexander Hamilton (plus 0.2) for the season, knocking down 41.4 percent of his 3-point tries and a ridiculous 92.5 percent of his attempts from the charity stripe. In all, Curry is giving Dallas owner Mark Cuban his money’s worth simply by serving as a reliably efficient alternate weapon on the perimeter alongside arguably the league’s top up-and-coming sensation, 20-year-old Luka Dončić.
And Curry, who has drawn nine starts while battling Tim Hardaway Jr. for playing time, is still putting his money where his mouth is in terms of his bold assertion on Fox Sports two years ago that he’s a better shooter than older brother Steph (now a three-time NBA champion and two-time MVP).
Seth and Steph sit atop the ranking of career 3-point percentages among active NBA players. Though both their marks round to 43.5 percent, the younger Curry technically wears the crown by three-thousandths of a point.
Curry — the youngest son of NBA legend Dell Curry and husband since September to Callie, the older sister of former Duke basketball teammate Austin Rivers — currently ranks fourth among the NBA’s all-time leaders in 3-point percentage behind Steve Kerr (45.4), Hubert Davis (44.1), and the late Dražen Petrović (43.7).
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“We want him to be forever,” Cuban remarked about Curry in 2017, per the Dallas Morning News, before then letting him slip away to Portland after a left leg injury kept him off the court for the entire 2017-18 season. “He’s our kind of guy — shoots, plays hard defensively…high swag level, low volume level…Swaggy Swag’s a keeper.”
Swaggy Swag and the Mavericks next play at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday at the defending champion Toronto Raptors.
If Curry continues to sizzle from deep, keeping his title as the top active career 3-point marksman in both his family and the league, then Cuban should now have no problem putting his money where his mouth is well into the next decade.
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