Stephen Curry guides Warriors to his sport's greatest ever season

Chicago Bulls eclipsed as three-point king rewrites the rules

Stephen Curry has been up to his three-point tricks again (Getty )

It was the NBA’s night of miracles. Kobe Bryant was making his final appearance for the Los Angeles Lakers. Le tout Hollywood was there to watch and single tickets were going for $20,000 (£14,000)-plus. And for a couple of hours all his 37 years, all his injuries, vanished as the Laker’s last titan racked up an astounding 60 points against the Utah Jazz. But these theatrics weren’t Wednesday’s top basketball highlight. In fact, it wasn’t even the biggest basketball story in the state of California.

At the very moment Kobe was bowing out in glory, 370 miles to the north in Oakland the Golden State Warriors were completing an even more remarkable feat – the best single season by a team in NBA history. Led by their superstar point guard Stephen Curry the Warriors won their 73rd game of the regular season, eclipsing the 72-10 record set by the 1995/1996 Chicago Bulls.

Those were the Bulls of Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Steve Kerr and Dennis Rodman, owners of six NBA Championships between 1991 and 1998, regarded by some as the greatest team ever to grace the sport. That judgement may now have to be revised.

These days Kerr is head coach of the Warriors, and after the game he expressed his amazement. “I thought the 72-10 would never be broken, I thought it was like Di Maggio’s 56-game hitting streak [from baseball’s own miracle season of 1941]. But I’ll say the same thing now I said 20 years ago: I don’t think this one will ever be broken.”

Normally in US sports, regular seasons barely matter. In the Premier League, the team with the most points at the end of the season wins, period. Not so in America. The regular season is only the start.

All the major sports – baseball, football, basketball and ice hockey, as well as Major League Soccer – have a post season consisting of four rounds of play-offs. In basketball and hockey, all of them are best-of-seven: if it goes the distance in all of them for a total of 28 games then a team plays the equivalent of an extra third of a season. The playoffs, not the regular season, determine who wins the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA Championship.

And for the regular season, who cares? Back in 2001 baseball’s Seattle Mariners won a record 116 games, but lost in the second round of the playoffs, and no-one remembers. The same may happen this year with hockey’s Washington Capitals. They’ve put together a regular season for the ages. But if they lose in an early playoff round (as past form indicates they will), all will be forgotten. The only thing that counts is lifting the Stanley Cup.

But whatever happens to Golden State in the basketball playoffs, this 2015/2016 regular season will be remembered for ever. It started with a 24-game unbeaten run, itself a record in any US sport. On top of that, the Warriors already are the reigning NBA champions; adding another Championship won’t be such a big deal. Third and most important, they may be one of the tiny number of teams that actually change the nature of their sport.

Across the country, their every game has been a sell-out. Fans packed the arenas before the game even started, just to watch the Warriors warm up. And the object of their attention? Above all, Curry.

By basketball standards, he's hardly imposing, a mere 6ft 3, inches shorter and stones lighter than Bryant or LeBron James who – at least until Curry came along – was generally acknowledged as the NBA’s best player. But, aided by his fellow guard Klay Thompson, Curry is revolutionising basketball.

For decades, it was essentially a “two-point game” of close-in scoring, of dunks and tip-ins, rebounds and mazy dribbles. Curry can do all of that. But his speciality is the three-pointer, long-range shots from outside an arc, between 22 and 23 feet away from the basket.

The three-pointer has long been around, but was largely seen as a gimmick, until the NBA took it up in the 1979/1980 season. Even then it was an extra, a variant that spiced up the game but did not affect its basic nature. Curry with his radar-guided distance shooting has changed that. On their day – which is pretty much every day – he and Thompson have shown that the three-pointer is not just an disposable accessory. It’s all but unstoppable, impossible to defend against.

Against the Memphis Grizzlies on Wednesday, Curry started off with six of them in the first 12 minutes. By game’s end, he had shot 10 three-pointers, bringing his regular season total to 402. Before this year, no player had topped 300. Between them, Curry and Thompson now account for the top four NBA regular-season three-point totals ever.

So the arguments begin. Are the Warriors the best team ever? Can they get better still? Most unthinkable of all a couple of years ago, some suggest that Curry is as good as Air Jordan himself. Not yet, surely – but the very comparison is itself a mighty tribute.

As for the rest of basketball, there is but one consolation as it struggles in the Warriors’ wake. Not long ago, the Lakers ruled the NBA as the Bulls did in the 1990s, as Curry and his colleague Warriors threaten to do so today. On Wednesday, Bryant may have exited in glory. But the Lakers are a mess, rock bottom of the Western Conference, owners of the NBA’s second worst record. All things must pass. Even the Golden State Warriors.