Stephen Curry Somehow Made NBA’s Hallowed MVP Award Wholly Inadequate

Somehow, becoming the first unanimous MVP in NBA history doesn’t feel like enough.

Not after Stephen Curry’s season punctuated by paradigm-shifting play and more “there’s no way that’s true” statistical firsts.

I mean, it’s nice. It’s great. Winning MVP in unprecedented fashion—especially when the voting pool is made up of potentially biased team-affiliated writers and broadcasters—is a big deal. But the MVP is still an award the NBA has handed out 60 times before.

Winning it in a sweep of all the first-place votes is a necessary way to start appreciating Curry’s 2015-16 season, but it’s not sufficient.

Because this was more than a great season. When you wrap all its component parts together, it may have been the most significant single year a player has ever produced.

The Incomparable Numbers

You have to start with stats.

I made the case Curry should have been the league’s most improved player a handful of times during the year, and at the conclusion of the regular season, there was ample evidence he deserved the hardware.

Consider this, from ESPN.com’s Tom Haberstroh: “Curry improved his player efficiency rating by more than any reigning MVP in history. In 1984-85, Larry Bird increased his PER by 2.3 points, the highest increase at the time for a reigning MVP. Curry’s improvement: 3.5.”

Last year’s greatest got greater—by a larger margin than any previous MVP. And without firing shots at C.J. McCollum, who took home MIP honors, the leap from OK to good is impressive. But ascending from MVP to something else entirely is different.

It’s unheard of…sort of like many other numbers Curry produced.

He became the first player to attempt more than 500 threes from at least 25 feet, Sports Illustrated’s Ben Golliver noted, and Curry hit an absurd 44.6 percent of those 565 tries. The league average on such long-distance flings: 35.4 percent.

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According to Haberstroh, Curry took 200 contested threes off the dribble. He hit 42.5 percent of them. Only nine players in the league converted better percentages on catch-and-shoot threes, per NBA.com. Curry, of course, led everyone with a 48.8 accuracy rate on standstill treys.

The marriage of volume and efficiency was (here comes that word again) unprecedented. Only eight players besides Curry have ever shot at least 50 percent from the field, 40 percent from the three-point line and 90 percent from the foul line. Curry’s combined percentages (45.4/50.4/90.8) are historic on their own. But according …

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