Stephen Curry really hit 105 points from three consecutive points

During the holidays, Stephen Curry did something that challenges our understanding of what a basketball player, or even a human being, is capable of. Something you have a little trouble believing, even after watching everything on video.

Stephen Curry hit 105 out of three consecutive points.

I counted them all myself and I can confirm that it hit 103 straight on the video. (The team says he did hit 105 in a straight line and that the camera didn’t start shooting until attempt number three came in.) Watching the entire clip from start to finish is a really conflicting experience: on the one hand, Steph is o The greatest three-point shooter to ever exist, so of course any shot is likely to enter. But, even after repeated views, you expect it to reach number 28, or number 51 or number 60. It must miss number 74, right? This has to end.

No, he keeps going. In fact, once he tries the number 80 around the 4-minute mark, he reaches superhuman levels of accuracy, with most of his kicks barely disturbing the net. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an athlete look more like machines. I can’t get over this.

What are the chances of this happening? Well, Steph is a .434 three-point shooter throughout his NBA career. Obviously, we have to throw this out the window, because these conditions are completely different: he faces no defense, his friends are there to recharge him and keep him at his pace, and he has the luxury of taking each picture exactly the same local. Still, while we’re here, let’s assess the man’s qualifications.

Curry put together three seasons of three-point shooting that seemed to have come from the future. Since then, James Harden has managed three more in one season, but no one has ever been more efficient at anything close to that volume. Again, he is the greatest three-point shooter of all time, and this is one of the few things that nobody debates.

But what exactly are your chances of hitting 105 (we saw only 103, but I can easily believe in 105) three consecutive training sessions? We cannot know, because, apart from this particular feat, we have no percentage of “undisputed three corner pitches on a T-shirt”. What we can do is calculate the chances of any possible shot percentage.

Across the sports world, what percentage of statistics commonly held tends to produce the best results? The Secret Base team spent a few minutes throwing things at the wall – percentage of NHL goalkeeper defense, percentage of extra NFL points before moving the line back, etc.

External defender Jon Jay holds the record with a career placement percentage of 0.9958. It can’t get much better than that. Hit him on the ball 10,000 times, and he cheats 42 of them. It is ridiculous to imagine that a three-point sniper could be executed as reliably as an outfielder catching a pop-up, but let’s do it anyway.

Jay’s chances of hitting 105 consecutive balls without error are 64.3%. If the percentage of Curry’s pitches were as high as the highest percentage of anything anyone has ever recorded in sports, he would have less than a 2 in 3 chance of doing what we just saw.

Just for fun, let’s try to use this video, and just this one, to spit out what percentage of his pitch is for that particular scene.

Suppose, instead of playing in the NBA, Steph spent all day, every day, shooting exactly that photo. We are talking about hundreds of thousands of photos, which gives us a percentage of photos with a huge sample size. If that percentage of pitches was 0.900, which is hard to imagine at first, your chances of hitting 105 in a straight line are a thousandth of a percent – virtually impossible. If the percentage of pitches was 0.950, your chances would still be less than 1%. It needs to be 0.975 to have the chance for a punch. It needs to be about 0.995 even be likely by any length of the word.

Look at Steph right after attempt number 106.

Steph himself seems a little excited, a little irritated with himself. Your friend despairs. Some others circulate in the gym, clearly unaware of what happened on the other side of the room. Did that guy just take our understanding of what is and what is not within the reach of human capacity and put it on his knee? Eh, it’s hard to say from here, but he sure looks mad about something.

Previously in Dorktown: