Basketball is not a sport, it's a way of life.

Steph doing Steph things, Jalen Green playing like he's got mouths to feed, Brunson burner...

QUICK HITS

• There are few things in sports that are objectively inarguable, but Steph Curry as the greatest shooter ever is one such thing. On Wednesday, Steph connected on his 300^th three of the season against the Memphis Grizzlies in a 137-116 Warriors win. Remarkably, this is the fifth time that Steph has eclipsed the 300 made threes mark in a season, a feat only two other players have ever accomplished (James Harden – 378 in ’19; Klay Thompson – 301 in ’23). More impressively still, Steph now owns 9 of the 18 best seasons ever in terms of three-pointers made. To get a sense of just how damn elite a shooter Steph is, here are the other players on the list of top-20 single-season threes made; the list became 21 due to a tie between Duncan Robinson and Damian Lillard. (E-mail readers, click to expand)

• I know there hasn’t been much to celebrate in Detroit this season, but if you’re a Pistons fan, you have to feel excited about what you have seen from Cade Cunningham over the last few months. Really, it’s been back since mid-December—the 15^th to be exact—that an inflection point in the season was reached for the former number one overall pick in the ’21 draft. Since that fateful December day when the Pistons’ third-year guard put up a season-low ten points on two of nine shooting in a loss to Philadelphia, Cunningham has looked like a different player. Through that game, the 25^th of Detroit’s season, Cade was averaging a respectable 21.3 points and 7.1 assists, but was doing so on 41.6% shooting from the floor and 32% from distance, while averaging 4.1 turnovers per game—tied for worst in the league with Trae Young. Basically, the third-year guard, who missed all but 12 games last year due to an ankle injury, was taking as much off the table as he was putting on. With that early poor play, especially where the shooting and turnovers were concerned, people were far too quick to begin the Cade bust talk. Particularly for a player who is essentially playing in his second season, on a roster whose lack of perimeter shooting makes for an absolutely terrible tactical fit for Cade, who thrives on driving lanes and spacing. Cade’s lack of explosive quickness means he’s at his best when he’s given appropriate spacing for a runway to get downhill, where his elite processing at full speed and his great length (7’0 wingspan) can be optimized. Instead, Detroit often employed plodding lineups with scant perimeter shooting that felt like an homage to a bygone era of basketball—the Pistons are tied with the Magic for dead-last in threes made this season—creating lane-clogging spacing that stymied much of what Cade excels at. But great players figure it out, and it appears Cade is doing just that. Following that Dec 15^th nadir, over a sample size that is now 34 games, Cunningham is averaging 22.7 points and 7.9 assists (good for 11^th league-wide during the stretch), while getting his turnovers down to a palatable three per game, and encouragingly increasing his shooting to 47.1% and 37.3% respectively. As importantly, it feels like Pistons head coach Monty Williams has finally diagnosed the best ways to put his budding star in positions that optimize his skillset, running more handoffs for Cunningham—Cade’s 1.9 points per game off those actions is 15^th in the league and sixth amongst all point guards—in an effort to get him at near full-speed at the onset of his touches, and playing lineups with more spacing to allow him to get into the paint to score or distribute. In truth, the early conversations about Cade’s struggles were as reflective of the maddening impatience now levied against players in the hyperbolic take-cauldron that is the media nowadays. But I am happy that the young man is figuring it out and showing all the flashy potential that made him such a highly-regarded prospect less than just three years ago.

• While we’re talking about team three-point shooting, here are both the top-5 and bottom-5 teams in the league in terms of total threes made this season, along with their overall records. (E-mail readers, click to expand)

  Interestingly, if we eliminate the outliers on both ends (the Pistons and Celtics), the cumulative record and winning percentage for each group looks like this:

  Bottom-4: 168-114; win percentage: 59.8%

  Top-4: 163-116; win percentage: 58.4%

  It’s doubtful that the three-point genie will never be put back in the proverbial bottle, but it’s worth noting that volumed success from long-range is not as clearly indicative of team success as we often attribute it nowadays.

• It felt fitting that I wait until March to sing the praises of Jalen Brunson, seeing as he was one of the more successful March performers that we’ve seen in recent memory, winning national championships at Villanova in 2016 & ’18; making the all-tournament team in 2018 along the way. Really, Brunson was just one of the more successful college players of recent memory, no matter the month, having collected just about every piece of hardware a player can in his three years at Villanova (click here to see the impressive credentials). Yet, when it came draft time in 2018, teams didn’t see a player who just won at every level, nor one who had defied the odds and the critics at every turn. Rather, they saw an undersized scoring guard—Brunson is listed at 6’2, and that may be generous—who was tough and a great leader, but unlikely to be able to compensate for a somewhat unorthodox style of play and a conspicuous lack of explosive athleticism. So, despite having proven everything he could at the collegiate level, Brunson dropped to the 33^rd pick for the Dallas Mavericks in the 2018 draft. The same draft the organization selected Luka. Meaning, at best, Brunson would likely be vying for a backup role on his new squad. But as he’s done at every level, Brunson went to work, and quickly began to prove people wrong. Brunson refined the herky-jerky game that is now his trademark, getting his footwork to the level of Fred Astaire displays of beauty. By his third year in the league, he was averaging double-digits in scoring (12.6 ppg), becoming an analytics darling, and finishing fourth in the Sixth Man of the Year Award voting. In year four, he finished eleventh in the Most Improved Player award voting for his regular season efforts, averaging 16.3 points per game. Then, in a first-round series against the Utah Jazz in which Luka was injured for the first three games, Brunson showed that his impressive postseason play extends beyond the madness of March, as he averaged 32 points in the three games Luka missed, absolutely abusing Rudy Gobert in the pick-and-roll, and essentially deconstructing the Utah Jazz roster in the course of doing it. For the playoff run in ’22, in which Dallas surprisingly made the Western Conference Finals with much thanks to his play, Brunson averaged 21.6 points, including three different games where he scored 30 or more. Brunson’s playoff run drew a lot of attention, as he showed an ability to be a highly effective on-ball operator as a lead guard, duties he saw sparingly when sharing the court with Dončić. Sadly for the Mavericks, it also signaled to the world that Brunson was too good to continue to be cast in a supporting role, particularly in Dallas, where Luka’s heliocentric play relegated him to a distant second in terms of playmaking. During that ’22 season, Brunson had reportedly wanted a relatively meager 4-year $56 million, but after the Mavs famously fumbled contract negotiations throughout the year, Brunson decided to make his way to New York for a far more significant four-year $100 million deal. And he went back to work, averaging 24 points per game with the Knicks last season, while finishing third in the Most Improved Player Award voting and twelfth in MVP. Now, in his second season in New York, Brunson has been nothing short of spectacular, averaging a career-high 27.4 points per game (6^th in the league), on 47.5% from the floor and 40.2% from three, while playing the 18^th most minutes in the league (35.2), dishing out the 14^th most assists per game (6.5), and sporting the league’s eighth-highest usage percentage (30.1%). Yet, the best qualities of Brunson’s play actually don’t require much statistical investigation, as the little guy with a huge heart continues to be an engine for success, playing an inspiring and rugged brand of basketball that has endeared him to the Garden faithful in a way few players have. Brunson has clearly defined himself as not only the leader of the team but really the heart and soul of the group. With the MVP award often being as much about narrative as it is superlative, few players can stake a better claim to imprinting themselves upon a successful season for their team than Brunson, whose Knicks squad has been besieged by injuries, yet continue to be an absolute brutal out on a night-to-night basis due in very large part to Brunson’s brilliance. Despite significant time missed by Julius Randle, Mitchell Robinson, and the newly acquired OG Anunoby—it should be mentioned here that Brunson has appeared in 86% of his total potential games for his NBA career—Brunson has managed to lead the Knicks to a 42-28 record, good for fourth in the entire Eastern Conference. But this story is as much about Brunson’s improvement and resilience as it is about his current brilliance. If we excluded his second season in the league—where he only played 57 games due to a knee injury—Brunson has managed to increase his minutes played, scoring, assists, steals, threes made, win shares, usage percentage, and VORP (value over replacement player), year-over-year since entering the league. At this point, Brunson has improved so much and played so well since arriving in New York that that $25 million a year contract has become one of the best deals in sports. Again, all of this is a testament to Brunson’s now-growing legend of working his ass off. While there is a zero percent chance that he wins the MVP award—that seems likely headed to Denver for the third time in four years—Brunson deserves even more recognition and attention than he is currently getting this season for just how great of a player he has turned himself into.