Coming into the Houston Rockets‘ first-round series with the Golden State Warriors, one of the biggest talking points was Amen Thompson and whether he was actually some kind of Steph Curry stopper.
He’s not. Nobody is. Curry gave Thompson, who is already probably the best defender in the league not named Victor Wembanyama, a quick reality check with 31 points on 12-of-19 shooting in Game 1. He had 36 in Game 3 with Houston’s entire defense chasing him in the absence of Jimmy Butler.
Indeed, this is not an indictment on Curry, who has been mauled in this series, and who, still, is just about the only player in the world who could even be doing what he’s doing against this brand of resistance.
But it hasn’t been easy, I’ll guaran-damn-tee you that. Curry was held scoreless in the first quarter of Game 5 — a 131-116 Rockets blowout that sends the series back to San Francisco with Golden State clinging to a 3-2 lead — and finished with just 13 points. He had his pocket clean picked not once but twice by Thompson, who became just the fifth, and youngest, player in league history to record at least 25 points, five steals and three blocks in a playoff game.
Over the last two games of this series, Curry is averaging 15 points on 40% shooting. He’s missed 12 of his last 17 3-pointers and is under 40% from 3 with 19 turnovers for the series. This was after he was held to three points in Golden State’s final regular-season matchup with Houston. As defending one of the greatest scorers to ever live goes, this constitutes rarefied air.
“As a defender, you have to take [your] matchup personal, and he took it personal tonight,” Dillon Brooks, yet another one of Houston’s pit-bull defenders, said of Thompson’s approach to guarding Curry.
“He was reading Steph … staying in front … without reaching, without getting fouls, and we need that Amen. Every single game. ‘Cause we’re gonna go against Steph again. We need that same type of mentality. That tenacity he was playing with. It gives is a lot of energy. It gives us extra possessions. And it makes their best player [Curry] timid. That’s what we need, is for their best player to try to think, think, think the game, instead of playing in the flow.”
Brooks should probably be careful about assigning the word ‘timid’ to Stephen Curry, who is liable to use such a quote as fuel to burn the Rockets to the ground on Friday. But Brooks isn’t one to be careful with his words, and he’s also not necessarily wrong.
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Timid is a bit much, but there’s no question that Curry is feeling Thompson, and Houston’s defense as a whole, in the way a quarterback who’s been pressured on every pass starts feeling the rush before it even materializes. There have been numerous instances in this series where Curry has hurried his mechanics, trying to fire off a shot a beat quicker than he needed to, resulting in multiple airballs, because he knows Thompson is coming.
Curry has seen every defense in the book, but he isn’t used to a defender who can close space as quickly, or from as far away, as he can create it. And he certainly isn’t used to having his pocket picked. Even one of the greatest to ever do it isn’t immune to a little rattling.
It’s not just Thompson. Tracking Curry through his random maze of precisely chaotic movement is an all-hands-on-deck operation, but Thompson is drawing the primary assignment whenever possible and he is making plays that should be impossible.
The pressure he applies. The ground he covers. The awareness, at 22 years old, to be capable of tracking Curry with proper paranoia with the recovery range to still help everyone else is extraordinary.
Offensively, he’s already one of the best cutters in the game, a pogo stick in the paint and a human trampoline in transition. He decelerates for touch finishes like an All-Star. If he could shoot, he’d already be an All-NBA player. He may be one before long anyway. The man is a true glitch in the NBA’s most sophisticated models of athletic testing, and he and the Rockets are not getting scared in a series that has been captivating theatre from the start and just got even more interesting.
