The Hot Hand

The Warriors came to believe the three-point arc was a boundary in time. Inside the line was the game’s past. But the future of basketball was behind the line.

They were one of the first teams to realize they weren’t taking nearly enough three-pointers. But the great mystery and baffling paradox of modern basketball is what took so long. At the end of the 2009 season, right before Curry’s rookie year, a wonk for ESPN published an article in which he outlined the formula for basketball success: “If you want to exceed expectations, start bombing away from downtown. And if you want to disappoint everyone, stop.” He added, “It’s no wonder the rate of 3-pointers goes up every season . . . and why it’s likely to keep heading in that direction for some time.” Except it didn’t. At least not for a while. ESPN’s basketball expert wasn’t such an expert when it came to predicting the behavior of human beings.

How could a group of sophisticated thinkers be so wrong for so long about something that was so important? Pete Carril never understood it. Carril, the legendary coach of Princeton’s basketball team, was known as Yoda partly because he looked frighteningly similar to the Star Wars character and partly because he was a Jedi master himself. He recognized the value of three-pointers before anyone in his line of work. “I love the three-point shot,” Carril once wrote. “You know why? Because it means they’re giving us three points for the same shot we used to get two for.” It was so obvious that teams should be taking shots that were worth one more point that it was in the name of the shot. That common sense somehow made him a contrarian. But it wasn’t what he was saying as much as when he was saying it. Carril was encouraging his players to take advantage of the three-point line when Curry was still a baby.

The last win of Carril’s career came in the first round of the NCAA tournament in 1996. Princeton beat the defending national champion UCLA in an upset that was about as likely as Carril becoming an underwear model. And the world of college basketball reacted appropriately. It went completely bananas. But overlooked in the aftermath was the statistical omen that explained the shocking outcome: more than half of Princeton’s shot attempts that night were three-pointers.

As the game was ending, the television cameras panned to the UCLA bench and settled on a player stress-eating his shirt. He was exactly what they were looking for: the face of agony. Many years later, that very same player was hired by an NBA front office, and the team he built would shoot a whole bunch of three-pointers.

His name was Bob Myers. He was the general manager of the Golden State Warriors.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Myers was a good high school basketball player who never intended to play college basketball. His plan was to join a crew team. The only reason he was on the bench during that game against Princeton was that he’d come to UCLA a few years earlier looking for the rowing coach. It hadn’t crossed his mind that he could play basketball there. In fact, before a similar visit to an Ivy League university, he’d written to that school’s basketball coach to schedule a meeting. Myers couldn’t even get the courtesy of a response. But as he wandered around the UCLA sports complex, he bumped into a basketball coach, who noticed that he was tall and encouraged Myers to attend a tryout. Myers took him up on the invitation. He made the team as a walk-on. He was on the bench as the Bruins won the national championship, and he soon found himself celebrating on the cover of Sports Illustrated. That was the thing about Bob Myers. He had a knack for being a part of big things as they happened. “We refer to Bob as our Forrest Gump,” his UCLA coach said.

By the time he was a senior, he wasn’t just playing for UCLA. He was starting for UCLA. The same kid who couldn’t get a meeting with an Ivy League university that didn’t offer scholarships was now on scholarship as one of the five best players for a basketball powerhouse. And everybody loved Bob. That was actually the headline of a story about him in the school newspaper: “Everybody Loves Bob.”

He parlayed that experience, his charming personality, and the handy fact that everybody loved him into a successful career as a sports agent once he graduated. He was good at that, too, and he might have been content negotiating contracts forever. But when his local NBA team was sold, Myers asked for a meeting with the Warriors. He was itching to join another basketball team like the one he’d known in college. As he walked out of his meeting with Joe Lacob, the brash Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d bought the team, Myers was absolutely positive that he would never be hired by the Warriors. For a while, he was right. Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. Myers had the same number of communications with Lacob as he did with that Ivy League coach. And then one day he got an unexpected call.

“Were you serious when you said this might be something you’d be interested in doing?” Lacob said.

Myers quit his job to join the Warriors, and he was quickly promoted to general manager, the top basketball decision-maker for his favorite NBA team. Stephen Curry was one of the foundational pieces of the roster that he inherited. He was the reason Bob Myers would once again be a part of a big thing as it happened.

Myers had always sensed there was a psychological incentive to shoot more three-pointers. He knew from firsthand experience how demoralizing the three-pointer could be for the other team. He was still a little scarred by UCLA losing to Princeton. “I remember viscerally feeling that when you were rooting for a team and the other team hit a three-pointer, it felt like five points,” he says. NBA teams had stopped taking more three-pointers by then. That didn’t make any sense to the Warriors. It seemed like a good idea to take more of the shots that were worth one more point. “There are analytical reasons to do it,” Myers says, “but then I’m not sure many thought it was possible or prudent.” But sometimes the most obvious ideas are the most radical. Every now and then they’re also the most successful. “What’s really interesting in venture capital and doing start-ups is how the whole world can be wrong,” Lacob says. “No one really executed a game plan, a team-building architecture, around the three-pointer. Could you win with that?”

It turned out that you could. But first your best shooter had to stop treating his weapon like a slingshot and start using it like a bazooka.

Only because of something beyond his control did all those loosely connected strands of wisdom braid together for Curry in the game against the Knicks. When the NBA reviewed tape of the brawl with the Pacers the night before, Curry had been one of the first players involved in the fight, when he charged a seven-foot-two, 280-pound giant named Roy Hibbert. The outcome was similar to what might happen if a mosquito attempted to tackle a moose. “I didn’t even feel him,” Hibbert would later say. What saved Curry was his size. He wasn’t big enough to do any damage in a fight involving NBA players. For his entire life, Curry had been smaller than everyone on the basketball court, and it had always been a disadvantage. But for this one night it worked to his improbable advantage. The league decided to fine him $35,000 instead of suspending him.

He was amazingly fortunate to lose so much money. The Warriors needed scoring against the Knicks. They had no choice but to free Curry. He was going to shoot more than ever before, and they could only hope that he got hot.

It took him until the second quarter to make his first three-pointer. But one minute later, he made another, longer three-pointer. He was heating up. The next one came a minute later. By any objective measure, it was a bad shot. Curry stole the ball and sprinted across half-court in a straight line on his way to the rim. But instead of continuing toward the basket, which is what almost everyone who had ever played basketball would have done, Curry stopped. He was choosing to stay behind the three-point line. There were two defenders between Curry and the rim who appeared to be shocked by his audacity. Curry was trying a low-percentage shot when a higher-percentage shot was available. He was taking his chances with three instead of accepting two. When the ball dropped through the net, he could hear Tim Kitzrow shouting the NBA Jam catchphrase.

Stephen Curry was on fire.

He tried another three-pointer one minute later as he was falling away from the rim several feet behind the arc. This shot was as outrageous as it was ridiculous. It didn’t look like it was going in. And then it did. Of course it did! He had the hot hand. “Most locked in I’ve ever been,” he recalls. “Any time I got a glimmer of daylight, I let it go.”

When athletes like Curry get hot, they take a puff of the powerful, legal performance-enhancing drug otherwise known as confidence. In the same way that getting a compliment from your boss makes you work harder, hitting one, two, three shots in basketball makes you want to shoot again. The normal chemistry of your brain gets washed away by a flood of dopamine. The frontal lobe begins to act like it’s temporarily disconnected from the nervous system. Your muscles melt into Jell-O. You stop thinking. You start behaving intuitively.

But you don’t have to be Stephen Curry to be familiar with the feeling of being soaked with adrenaline. One person who could relate to him was Creighton University forward Ethan Wragge. Heavily bearded and slightly overweight, like a lumberjack who got lost on his way to the forest, the closest that Wragge would ever come to an NBA game was buying a ticket. By almost every basketball metric, he was completely mediocre. Except for one. Wragge was a magnificent shooter.

There were practices when he made so many shots in a row that he lost count. It wasn’t difficult to figure out how to defend him. The most important part of the scouting report on Wragge—maybe the only important part of the scouting report on Wragge—was knowing not to let him shoot. But there was one night when Creighton played Villanova University and the ball went to Wragge on Creighton’s opening possession. He swished it. That one shot was all it took for Wragge to feel like he was heating up. He was seeing things in slow motion. It was like everyone around him was staggering drunk and he was dead sober. As soon as he hit one shot, he wanted another shot. Wragge tried a deeper shot the next time Creighton had the ball. Again: swish. So he hunted for a third shot. “I feel like it’s going in no matter what,” he says. He was right. Wragge’s third shot went in. So did his fourth shot. And his fifth shot. And his sixth shot. And even his seventh shot. By the time he finally missed, Wragge had scored twenty-one of his team’s first twenty-seven points, one of the most amazing shooting exhibitions anyone had ever seen. “It was, like, this automatic, unconscious feeling,” he says. “I don’t even know how to describe it.”

The unscientific name for that automatic, unconscious feeling is “the zone.” The zone is a lovely place to be. As it happens, if you needed to describe the zone in two words, you could do worse than “automatic” and “unconscious.” The scientists who have actually bothered studying these “flow states” have begun to recognize that acquiring the hot hand is a result of thinking less, not more. The person who pioneered this line of work is a Hungarian American psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who has spent almost sixty years thinking about the flow state. That’s a lot of thinking about flow. What he learned is that being in a flow state is an immensely pleasurable experience. “The way a long-distance swimmer felt when crossing the English Channel was almost identical to the way a chess player felt during a tournament or a climber progressing up a difficult rock face,” he wrote. “What they did to experience enjoyment varied enormously—the elderly Koreans liked to meditate, the teenage Japanese liked to swarm around in motorcycle gangs—but they described how it felt when they enjoyed themselves in almost identical terms.”

The hot hand made them happy. That’s the reason Curry, Wragge, and everyone who has felt the hot hand remembers it so fondly.

That night in the Garden was not Curry’s first experience with flammability. The first that others remember was when he was six years old and played for a team that was actually called the Flames. But the first that he remembers was in the eighth grade. The Currys had moved to Canada, and Stephen and his younger brother, Seth, enrolled at Queensway Christian College. “We were a small little Christian school where everyone who tried out made the team,” says their coach James Lackey. “It was the two of them and a bunch of guys who’d won three games the year before.”

Queensway won every game the year that Stephen Curry arrived. He caught fire so frequently that his coach often shook his head in sheer wonder and thought, What the heck just happened? Curry’s last explosion came in front of an abnormally large crowd for a basketball game between eighth graders. Queensway was playing a team that bullied Curry as if NBA Jam rules were in effect. It worked. Down by six points with one minute remaining, Lackey called time-out. He figured his team had no chance to win. Since this was still nominally a middle school basketball game, he wanted to remind his players to keep their composure after the loss and congratulate their opponents when the game was over. Or at least that’s what he was planning to say. Curry stopped him in the middle of his sportsmanship lecture.

“We’re not losing,” he said. “Give me the ball. I’ll make sure we win.”

“Okay,” Lackey said. “I guess that’s the play from now on.”

They gave Curry the ball. He proceeded to make four three-pointers in the next thirty seconds. Queensway won. Curry’s past is littered with so many of these tales that they begin to seem mythological. Lackey swears this one is true. And there is no reason not to believe him: the guy teaches at a Christian school in Canada.

Why did Curry have the hot hand that day? Why did Curry have the hot hand on any day? Was it physical? Was it mental? Was it some bowl of cereal that he scarfed down that morning or a lucky seat on the bus that got pulled over on the way to the Garden? Curry himself doesn’t know. He can’t predict when he’ll be in the zone. But he knows he must do everything in his power to remain in that flow state for as long as possible.

“Once it happens,” Stephen Curry says, “you have to embrace it.”

Curry missed his next shot against the Knicks. If he were in NBA Jam, he would have returned to his normal ability. In this real NBA game, Curry didn’t take another three-pointer for the rest of the first half. But it wasn’t because he suddenly decided that he was lukewarm. It was because the Knicks understood as well as the Warriors that Curry was still hot. His teammates refused to touch his right hand because they didn’t want to cool him off. “There was nothing anybody could do,” said Carmelo Anthony of the Knicks, “except hope he misses.”

But there was something they could do: not let him shoot. The Knicks sent double-teams at Curry. They trapped him whenever he touched the ball. Their goal was no longer to beat the Warriors. The only thing they cared about was not letting Curry shoot.

Curry knew what it was like to be the sole focus of five other basketball players. When he was a budding star at Davidson College, there was one game when Loyola University Maryland’s coach tried to beat Davidson by not letting Curry shoot. His strategy was to double-team Curry no matter where he was on the court and no matter whether he actually had the ball. This coach would rather his team play three-on-four than five-on-five. Curry realized the folly of the plan, stood by himself in the corner, and dragged two Loyola defenders with him. That meant one of his teammates would always be open. Curry could have been eating nachos with fans in the front row and he still would’ve been helping Davidson. When he noticed that two guys were shadowing him everywhere he went, Curry figured he might as well get to know his babysitters. “Are you guys really double-teaming me the whole game?” he asked them. They didn’t know what to say, so they didn’t say anything. The gimmick would have been interesting if it weren’t such a complete disaster. Curry was college basketball’s leading scorer, and he finished the game against Loyola with zero points. Davidson won in a blowout.

But now the Knicks were more or less going with the Loyola game plan. Curry knew that meant one of his teammates had to be open, and he passed to those open teammates for easy shots. His shooting demanded so much attention that it had become easier for everyone around him to succeed. There’s actually a delicious basketball term for this: “gravity.” Curry always had the gravity to suck a defense close to him. But his gravity when he had the hot hand made Curry more like a black hole. His momentum warped the game around him. Both teams behaved as if Curry was probably going to make his next three-pointer, and their collective belief in the hot hand was as powerful as the hot hand itself. There was no one on the court who didn’t believe in the hot hand. In fact there may not have been anyone in the NBA who didn’t believe in the hot hand. “I haven’t met that person yet,” Curry says.

It wasn’t any easier for him to find open shots when the second half started. The Knicks chased him around the court like they were trying to drench him with a bucket of ice water. But his first shot after halftime was all it took to convince him to keep shooting. As soon as he touched the ball, he reminded himself to remain under control when his defender charged at him. He pump-faked—not unlike my own pump fake when I had the hot hand—and watched that defender fly past him. He centered himself, launched the shot, and took in the supreme beauty of his swish.

Curry hadn’t cooled off. Once he confirmed that he was scorching, he launched three-pointers that would have earned anyone else a permanent spot on the bench. One from three feet behind the line while double-teamed. One from five feet behind the line. One with a gigantic seven-footer in his face as Curry fell on his butt.

There was a certain sound that accompanied these shots. It began as he released the ball and fans drew a collective breath of anticipation. The pitch rose as their lungs filled. It peaked in a hysterical crescendo as the ball traced a parabola toward the rim. But his shots originated from so far away and followed such a high arc that all these fans ran out of oxygen. That was the noise: the Curry note. It was more recognizable as a shriek.

The last Curry note of the night came at the end of the fourth quarter, when he grabbed a rebound and seemed to be running to the other basket before he even had the ball. He took two dribbles to cross the half-court line. He took one more dribble to slow his momentum. And then he shot. In the millisecond it took for him to levitate, the equation of the possession had tilted Curry’s way. His defenders were caught flat-footed. Curry was rising above them. The ball hadn’t even swished through the net before he was backpedaling across the court in celebration. He galloped the length of the floor until he was underneath his own basket again. It was as if Curry were literally on fire and needed to extinguish himself. He was that hot. “I’ve never been to quite that place before,” he said afterward. “Not ever.”

The stunned Knicks fans gave this player from the other team a standing ovation. They didn’t know what else to do. Curry had scored fifty-four points—the most points he’d ever scored in a basketball game. In the history of the NBA, no one had taken so many three-pointers and made as many of them. He’d discovered the sweet spot of volume and efficiency.

The three-pointer was no longer a slingshot. Stephen Curry had made it his bazooka.

What happened in the Garden that night wasn’t an anomaly. It was an epiphany. His performance emboldened Curry to believe that he could shoot more and that he should shoot more. He’d been fully unleashed for the first time, and the results had been astonishing. He’d broken the game.

Curry had the full encouragement of the Warriors’ brass to keep shooting after that night. Their decision was part strategy, part stumbling upon something that worked, and part being smart enough to see that Curry would be at his most effective only if he was permitted to do things that nobody had ever done. In his career before that game, he averaged eighteen points, attempting five three-pointers per game. In his career after that game, Curry averaged twenty-six points, attempting ten three-pointers per game. Curry began shooting as many three-pointers as possible, which was more three-pointers than anyone ever thought possible. There was nowhere on the court that other teams could afford to leave him open. He was a better shooter from thirty to forty feet than the average NBA player was from three to four feet. He turned heaves from near the half-court logo into better shots than slam dunks. He set a record for the most three-pointers in a season, and then he shattered his own record by more than 40 percent. It looked more like a statistical error than a statistical outlier. What he did was almost beyond comprehension. It was the equivalent of Roger Bannister running his four-minute mile in two and a half minutes.

That night in Madison Square Garden when he had the hot hand turned out to be the night that changed Stephen Curry’s life. Within two years he was the most valuable player of the NBA. Within three years he was the first unanimous most valuable player in the history of the league. Within four years he was the most influential basketball player alive. The Warriors became an NBA dynasty built around Curry’s ability to shoot a basketball. At the peak of his popularity, fans were coming to Warriors games hours early to watch his warm-ups. But what they really hoped when they paid to see Curry in person was that it would be a night when he got hot. There was simply nothing in sports more thrilling than watching Stephen Curry get hot.

If you ask him for his career breakthroughs, those transcendent moments when he began to feel that he’d achieved what he could only imagine when he was a child playing NBA Jam, Curry will tell you about three. There was the time he won his first championship. There was the time he was invited by the White House to golf with Barack Obama. But none of this would have been possible if not for the third moment: the time that he was on fire.

5.

The surfers were catching the last waves before sunset as I walked into a beachfront restaurant on a typically perfect evening near San Diego. The sky was pink. The windows sucked in a soft breeze. The air smelled of salt and grass and sweat. And yet I had the nagging feeling that something was off. I finally realized why. It was such a pleasant summer night that no one was playing with their phones. And the only person who had any reason to be upset about that was the person I was meeting for dinner.

Mark Turmell was now in his midfifties. He was still tall enough to be a basketball player, but he was softer in the belly, and his sandy hair was short and spiky, as if it were apologizing for all those years that his perm fell below his shoulders. Turmell sat down and ordered a cheeseburger with only cheese, just the way he liked his Burger King chicken sandwich. He whipped out his iPhone and scrolled through photos of his wife, whom he had met online, which seemed appropriate. Of course he married someone who was in his life because of a computer. Before long he was scrolling through his apps to show me what he was doing at work these days. It was the same thing he’d been doing for almost forty years. Turmell was still making video games.

He was working for Zynga, the company to blame for addictive games like Words with Friends and FarmVille, and it was his job to keep people glued to their computers and phones in a way that felt so natural they didn’t even notice. He was outstanding at his job. Turmell could’ve built an actual farm with the productive hours that people had wasted playing Zynga games.