CLEVELAND — Stephen Curry saw all of the memes and heard the jokes about the shoes. He even thought some of them were funny.
“If I had them in my road bag I would have worn them,” he said after the Golden State Warriors’ 108-97 Game 4 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, which gave them a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals. “Just to show you how fire they are.”
All-white Curry 2 lows or no, the MVP looked like himself on Friday, scoring 38 points on 11-for-25 shooting and hitting seven three-pointers after struggling in the first three games of the series. His fellow Splash Brother, Klay Thompson, looked rejuvenated as well, with 25 points and four threes.
They were bound to get hot at some point.
“I don’t know that the shots were that much better than they’ve been,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said after the game. “I just think they got going. I mean, sooner or later it’s going to happen. With guys like that, you can’t keep them down forever. Sometimes our best offense is our defense, and we were making stops and we were able to get out and run and kind of flow into our offense. So maybe they got a few extra looks from that, but mainly it was just kind of law of averages took over, I think.”
The Warriors had won the first two games of the series in spite of poor performances by Curry and Thompson — in Game 1, it was Shaun Livingston and Leandro Barbosa that led the way, and in Game 2 it was Draymond Green. But Friday was vintage Splash Brothers, with Curry hitting shots that nobody else on the floor (save for maybe J.R. Smith) would have even thought of taking.
“I’ve seen him doing it for five years now,” Thompson said. “No one can really -- that’s a bad shot for everyone else in this league, but when you have Steph’s range and handle, we’ll take that shot every day. I mean, he’s our MVP. He makes us go, so we follow.
“He was sure with the ball tonight and just made the right decisions and let the game come to him. He played an amazing game. I’m proud of the way he competed and everyone else fed off that.”
Curry, too, was quick to credit his teammates for feeding off his performance.
“I obviously didn’t have to deal with foul trouble,” Curry said. “So I was on the floor a lot more. And my teammates set great screens. We got the ball moving from side to side, so I got some better looks off the ball as well. When you have obviously Klay knocking down threes on the wing, H.B. [Harrison Barnes] the way he stepped up and made some timely buckets for us, it kind of softens the defense because they’ve got to be aware of everybody, and then lanes open up and that’s when we’re at our best. So just kind of feeding off of that rhythm.”
Now, the Warriors have a chance to close out their second consecutive title, this time at home in the Bay Area. If they get another performance like this from Curry and Thompson, it’s hard to see that not happening.
“He’s Steph Curry,” Kerr said. “He’s the MVP for a reason. He doesn’t have the size and the strength to dominate a game physically, so he has to dominate with his skill, and that’s not an easy thing to do because your shot sometimes isn’t going to go in. But he has a lot of faith in himself, and he trusts his shot and he just kept firing, and tonight they went in.”