Stephen Curry laments the “hero shot” he took and missed against the Cavs from beyond the arc with time running out in Game 7 of the 2016 NBA Finals.
“It cost us a championship,” Curry concluded after his Golden State Warriors blew a 3-1 lead in the title round.
Kevin Love, who famously stopped Curry and helped secure Cleveland’s improbable victory, scoffed at the superstar guard’s belief that he “could have easily gone around” him for a quick bucket.
Per ESPN:
“I’m like, ‘I just need a little space’ — and that’s where I started to rush,” Curry says now. “I look back and think I could have easily gone around [Love] and gotten a 2, and we could have gotten a stop, and then I could come back down and hit another shot, and we win another championship, instead of me going for the hero shot, which I felt like I could make.
“That was a shot where I was not under control. And it cost us a championship.”
As Curry walked off the court, simultaneously devastated and furious with himself, the Cleveland Cavaliers fell into a heap of celebration. Curry surveyed the scene before he departed; he remembers exactly what he was thinking.
“Don’t ever make the mistake of rushing like that again,” he says.
Since then, Golden State has won back-to-back championships and is positioned for a three-peat. In that time, Curry has drilled 61 clutch shots within the last five minutes of the fourth quarter or overtime, according to ESPN Stats & Information. His clutch ability and mental resolve were highlighted in a seminal 33-point second-half performance to eliminate the Houston Rockets in Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals after he had gone scoreless in the first half.
“I guess you can say the [2016] miss didn’t haunt me,” he says.
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