# Stephen Curry: From Davidson to 4,000 Threes, in 16 Rankings
> Sixteen rankings hold Stephen Curry: three-point shooters, Warriors greats, mid-major stars, sneaker lines, and one list nobody wants to be on.
*By YPB Team · Published August 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/articles/stephen-curry-ranked-many-ways*
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Stephen Curry at Paris 2024 — one shooter, sixteen very different rankings. Photo: Clément Bardot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Stephen Curry turned 38 in March 2026, and nobody who has played basketball has made more three-pointers. He reached 4,000 of them on 13 March 2025 against Sacramento, the day before his 37th birthday; Ray Allen, the man he overtook, finished his career on 2,973.1
For a player this decorated, remarkably little else about him is fixed. His shoe deal ended in November 2025 and has not been replaced. He plays the coming season on a $62.5 million expiring contract, and from 29 August he can sign a two-year extension worth up to $136.7 million.2
He appears in sixteen rankings here. Each one wants something different from him.
> No one has made more three-pointers than Curry. Almost nothing else about his career is that settled.
## Curry vs Ray Allen: 2,973 threes, then 4,000
This is the category built around the single thing Curry does better than anyone alive. Eighteen shooters are in it, from Reggie Miller and Klay Thompson to Kyle Korver and Dale Ellis.
Curry's volume is not in dispute. He passed Ray Allen's career total in December 2021 and had added more than a thousand makes on top of it by the time he reached 4,000.1
Ray Allen brought the shot that outlives statistics. His corner three in Game 6 of the 2013 Finals is the most replayed jumper of the century, and it caps a career of 2,973 makes rather than one lucky night.
Dell Curry is on the same list, a long way behind his son. Volume is one way to measure shooting and efficiency is another, which is the case Korver's supporters make and the reason this is not the walkover it looks like.
The one list built around the thing he does. His father is on it too. Play it →
## Wilt Chamberlain vs Curry: the greatest Golden State Warrior
Restrict the field to a single franchise and it shrinks to thirteen names, drawn from eras that share little beyond a city.
Curry has spent his whole career in the jersey. The 2026-27 season is his eighteenth with Golden State, and four championships arrived in it.3
Wilt Chamberlain is the complication. He wore the jersey in Philadelphia and San Francisco, put 100 points on the board in one night, and did it in an era whose numbers nobody has approached since.
Rick Barry, Nate Thurmond and Chris Mullin carried the franchise through decades when it won nothing at all. Klay Thompson and Draymond Green were on the floor for every one of Curry's titles, which is the objection Warriors supporters raise whenever the credit gets assigned to one man.
Eighteen seasons in one jersey narrows the field considerably. Play it →
## The queue at point guard
Eighteen point guards are gathered in this ranking, and Stephen Curry is one of them. Filed by position rather than by skill, he is in much heavier traffic.
Magic Johnson won five titles running the position at 6 ft 9 in. Oscar Robertson averaged a triple-double for a season in 1962. John Stockton holds the career assists record and is not close to being caught.
Curry's case is that he changed what the job description is, not that he did the traditional version of it best. Isiah Thomas, Steve Nash and Chris Paul all ran teams in ways he never has.
The same player, filed by position, in much heavier traffic. Play it →
## Usain Bolt, Serena Williams and twenty athletes of a century
Step outside basketball and Curry becomes one of twenty names covering tennis, sprinting, swimming, football, golf and Formula 1.
His qualification here is reach rather than medals. Basketball's shot chart looks different at every level of the game because of him, from the NBA down to under-12s.
Usain Bolt still holds both sprint world records seventeen years after setting them. Michael Phelps has 23 Olympic golds and Serena Williams has 23 major singles titles. Three more tennis players are here: Federer, Nadal and Djokovic.
Curry's own Olympic gold came late, with the United States at Paris 2024.3 Against that company, four NBA titles is a strong record rather than an unanswerable one.
Twenty athletes, six sports, and one of them a guard from Akron. Play it →
## The shot that moved every arc
Twelve athletes qualify for this ranking, Stephen Curry among them, and the test is not excellence. It is whether their sport looks physically different for their having played it.
Curry belongs because of geometry. Before him the three-pointer was a specialist's tool used from the corners; now it is the shot around which offences are designed, and teams take roughly twice as many of them per game as they did when he entered the league in 2009.
Dick Fosbury changed how every high jumper on earth clears a bar. Royce Gracie proved in the first UFC tournaments that grappling beat striking, and mixed martial arts reorganised itself around the discovery. Jackie Robinson changed who was allowed to play at all.
Bill Russell is also here, which is the useful comparison. He made defence a strategy rather than a reaction, and did it while winning eleven championships in thirteen seasons.
The counter to Curry is that he did not invent the three-pointer, and that Steve Kerr's offence and a decade of analytics were pushing the same way regardless. What he did was make the extreme version of it obviously correct.
Twelve athletes who moved the rules of a game, Curry among them. Play it →
## Warriors 2015–2022 vs Bulls 1991–1998
Curry enters this one as seven years of a team rather than as himself, among eight dynasties.
The Golden State entry covers four championships in eight seasons, including the 73-win year of 2015-16.4 That regular season is still the best any team has managed.
The Chicago Bulls of 1991-98 won six titles in eight years and never lost a Finals. Bill Russell's Boston Celtics won eleven in thirteen. Those are the records that make an eight-year run with four rings look ordinary.
The Warriors also carry an asterisk the others do not: Kevin Durant arrived in 2016 already a former MVP, and two of the four titles came with him on the roster.
Not a player here — a seven-year stretch of one team. Play it →
## Kyrie Irving's three, and Curry's own Finals night
Fifteen moments make up this ranking, and Curry appears in two of them from opposite ends.
One is his 2022 Finals MVP, the only time he has won the award in four championship runs.3 Andre Iguodala took it in 2015 and Kevin Durant took it twice.
The other entry is Kyrie Irving's three over Curry in Game 7 of the 2016 Finals, filed under great moments with Curry as the defender.
Michael Jordan's last shot, Willis Reed's entrance and Magic Johnson's sky hook are the company. Being in a ranking of moments twice is a strange kind of distinction when one of the two is a shot that beat you.
He is on it twice: once for the trophy, once as the man being shot over. Play it →
## Sixty-two points, and the two nights above it
Seventeen single-game scoring performances are gathered here, and Curry's best night is one of them.
On 3 January 2021 he scored 62 against Portland in a 137-122 win, shooting 18 of 31 from the floor.5 It was the most any Warrior had scored since Rick Barry's 64 in 1974.
Wilt Chamberlain's 100 points in 1962 is the number that ends this conversation, and Kobe Bryant's 81 in 2006 is the modern version of it.
Luka Dončić, Donovan Mitchell and Damian Lillard have all gone past 70 in a single game. Volume scoring was never the thing he was built for, which is why a career-high of 62 is remarkable for him and unremarkable on this particular list.
Sixty-two points, and it still has a 100 and an 81 in front of it. Play it →
## LeBron James vs Curry, both past 35
Twenty players are on this list, and Curry joined it most recently.
The 2025-26 season was the most broken of his career. He played 43 games, missing 27 in a row with a knee injury, and still averaged 26.6 points and 4.4 threes a game.6
LeBron James set the standard here by a wide margin. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar won a title at 40. Karl Malone and John Stockton played into their late thirties at close to full strength.
The reason the section exists now is the calendar. Curry can sign a two-year extension from 29 August, which would take him to 40 in a Warriors jersey, and the injury season is the argument against it.
The list he joined most recently, and the one his next contract is about. Play it →
## One recent season, and a much shorter memory
Ask about one season only, and a career record stops being admissible.
Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Victor Wembanyama are all in this ranking of sixteen. Most of them are a decade or more younger than Curry.
Phrased this way the question ignores everything a player did before January, and that is the point of asking it.
One season only, and the all-time record is inadmissible. Play it →
## Curry vs Kyrie Irving, filed under rivalries
Nine point-guard rivalries are in this ranking, and Curry is half of one of them rather than a name in his own right.
Curry against Kyrie Irving covers the 2016 and 2017 Finals and a decade of skill-versus-skill comparisons that never resolved.
Magic Johnson against Isiah Thomas is the pairing that defined the 1980s, and Gary Payton against John Stockton ran for a decade of Western Conference playoffs.
Being an entry in a rivalry rather than a player on a list is its own reframing, and it puts Curry next to Irving instead of ahead of anyone.
Not a player here either — half of a matchup, filed beside Magic and Isiah. Play it →
## Davidson 2008: Curry against Larry Bird's Indiana State
Before any of the rest of it, Curry played for a college of about 2,000 students in North Carolina. This ranking gathers twenty players who did their best work outside the power conferences.
Davidson entered the 2008 NCAA tournament as a 10 seed and reached the Elite Eight. Curry scored 40 against Gonzaga, 30 against Georgetown and 33 against Wisconsin, then 25 against Kansas in a 59-57 defeat that stopped them one game short of the Final Four.7
Larry Bird is the name that makes this hard. He took Indiana State to an undefeated regular season and the 1979 championship game against Magic Johnson's Michigan State, in what is still the most-watched college basketball game ever played.
Bill Russell won back-to-back titles at San Francisco. David Robinson did it at Navy, Julius Erving at UMass, and Steve Nash at Santa Clara.
The modern half of the list is thinner on trophies and heavier on single tournaments: Ja Morant at Murray State, C.J. McCollum at Lehigh, Gordon Hayward's half-court attempt for Butler in 2010. Curry's run belongs to that group, and it is the reason a school with no basketball history has a permanent place in March.
A 10 seed from a school of two thousand, before any of the rest of it. Play it →
## Curry x Under Armour: twelve years, then out
Of the eighteen endorsement deals gathered here, Curry's is the one to have changed hands most recently.
He left Nike for Under Armour in 2013 after a pitch meeting in which a Nike executive mispronounced his name and a slide still carried Kevin Durant's. The deal that followed built Curry Brand into the second-best-selling basketball line in the United States.
The twelve-year partnership ended in November 2025. Curry kept sole ownership of Curry Brand, shoes continue to release through Under Armour during 2026, and for the first time since that meeting he has no shoe company.8
Michael Jordan's Nike deal is the one every other entry is measured against, because it produced a brand worth more annually than most of the league. LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo both signed lifetime agreements. Against those, a partnership that ended after twelve years reads as a great deal rather than a permanent institution.
A twelve-year partnership that ended in 2025, measured against lifetime deals. Play it →
## The Curry line next to Air Jordan
The same brand, judged as a product rather than a contract, against seventeen other signature basketball lines.
Air Jordan is not really a sneaker line here so much as the reason signature sneaker lines exist. Nike Kobe and Nike LeBron have longer runs and deeper back catalogues.
Curry's shoes have always been sold on performance rather than looks, and nostalgia rarely attaches itself to performance. The Reebok Question and the Puma Clyde qualify here on looks alone.
Second-best-selling basketball shoe in the country, in very old company. Play it →
## Stephen and Seth Curry vs the Williams sisters
Fifteen sibling pairs are ranked here across tennis, football, boxing, cricket and basketball, and the Currys are the only entry where one brother is an all-time great and the other is a career role player.
Seth Curry has played for eight NBA teams as one of the most accurate three-point shooters in the league. The brothers met in the 2021 playoffs, Golden State against Philadelphia.
Venus and Serena Williams took fourteen Grand Slam doubles titles as a pair, unbeaten whenever they reached that final. Peyton and Eli Manning won four Super Bowls between them. Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko held world heavyweight titles at the same time.
That is a category where four championships and a shooting record count for less than having a sibling who reached the same level.
The one question where having a brother who also made it counts most. Play it →
## The 73-win team, on the wrong list
This ranking collects seventeen collapses. The best regular-season team in NBA history is among them.
Golden State won 73 games in 2015-16 and Curry took his second straight MVP, the first won by a unanimous vote.3 They then led the Finals 3-1 and lost Game 7 at home to Cleveland.4
The competition for worst is real. The 2013 Spurs were five points up with 28 seconds left in Game 6 before Ray Allen's corner three. The 2018 Rockets missed 27 consecutive three-pointers in a Game 7. The 2007 Mavericks won 67 games and went out in the first round.
What separates the Warriors entry is that the record season and the defeat are the same season. Ten months of the best basketball anyone had played, and the thing most often remembered about it is the week at the end.
The 73-win season, filed under the one category nobody wants to be in. Play it →
## Sixteen questions, one shooter
The thing Curry is unmatched at is a single skill, and every question that widens past it brings in names who were never going to be beaten by a guard. A Davidson 10 seed, eighteen years in one jersey, a sneaker brand between owners and a Game 7 in Cleveland are four separate careers filed under the same name.
All sixteen are decided by the same mechanic: [two options, one pick, repeated](/articles/what-is-pairwise-comparison).
If there is a Curry question none of these sixteen asked, the site will let you build it.
## More rankings, more angles
- [Kobe Bryant's Records Keep Falling. The Lists Keep Him.](/articles/kobe-bryant-ranked-many-ways) — 81 points, five titles, one franchise
- [Magic Johnson vs Larry Bird: 47 Years of the Same Argument](/articles/magic-johnson-vs-larry-bird-ranked) — Bird turns up on Curry's shooting list too
- [LeBron James vs Michael Jordan: Who Wins Which List?](/articles/lebron-james-vs-michael-jordan-ranked) — the same question, split across categories
Sources
ESPN — Curry reaches 4,000 career three-pointers (13 March 2025 vs Sacramento); Ray Allen's previous record of 2,973: espn.com (checked 2026-08-17)
ESPN — Curry's $62.5m expiring 2026-27 contract and 29 August eligibility for a two-year, $136.7m extension: espn.com (checked 2026-08-17)
Wikipedia — Stephen Curry: four championships, one Finals MVP (2022), the first unanimous MVP (2016), Paris 2024 Olympic gold: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-17)
ESPN — the 2015-16 Warriors' 73-win season and the Game 7 Finals defeat to Cleveland after leading 3-1: espn.com (checked 2026-08-17)
ESPN — Warriors 137-122 Trail Blazers, 3 January 2021: Curry's career-high 62 points on 18-of-31 shooting: espn.com (checked 2026-08-17)
RotoWire — Curry's 2025-26 season: 43 games, 27 missed in a row with a knee injury, 26.6 points and 4.4 threes a game: rotowire.com (checked 2026-08-17)
Wikipedia — 2007-08 Davidson Wildcats: a 10 seed beating Gonzaga 82-76, Georgetown 74-70 and Wisconsin 73-56 before losing 59-57 to Kansas: wikipedia.org (checked 2026-08-17)
ESPN — Curry and Under Armour end their twelve-year partnership (13 November 2025); Curry Brand continues independently: espn.com (checked 2026-08-17)
