Size is a big part of the NBA. Height matters a lot, but weight is important too. How heavy a player isn’t just key in terms of being able to body up an offensive player or push through an and-1, it’s also indicative of how well someone matches up against their competition.
In this guide, I will break down Stephen Curry’s weight in relation to his other measurements to show how he matches up to the rest of the league and reveal how his size (or lack thereof) helped shape his career.
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An Average Size
Weight, unlike height, is commonly overlooked in the NBA. It’s not a measurement people think of when they look at basketball players, nor is it something that comes up too often. Even so, it matters at every single position. That includes point guards.
Curry stands at 6’2 in height and clocks in at a modest 185 pounds. In both cases, he’s small for a modern NBA point guard. His height puts him an inch below the average, while his weight sits five pounds below the league mark.
He’s not the smallest person to run the point, but there are plenty of matches where he’s undersized. However, rather than let larger players body him up or take advantage of that discrepancy, he just adapted to another style of play.
A Different Path
Curry has never been a particularly large guard. While he put on a few pounds since getting drafted, he’s still right in the same ballpark as he was when he came into the league. That means he’s always been undersized against most other professional athletes.
That can be a large problem for some players, but Curry never backed down from bigger athletes. While he could have tried to go through his defenders, he simply decided to go around them.
Quick, Fast, and Stealthy
Curry is an outside shooter whose game consists of both quick inside moves and deep threes. Both of those are key parts of his identity, and they’ve each worked to shape the entire path of the modern NBA. Both of those aspects are a result of Curry’s smaller size.
As he could never lean on his weight like Luke Doncic or Kyle Lowry, Curry had to rely on shiftiness and quick moves. He developed his cross-overs and basketball IQ more than his raw athleticism, which then gave way to deeper and deeper threes.
On top of that, he built a lightning-fast release. He gets the ball out extremely quickly, which allows him to get around much bigger players. That’s also why he shoots from so far away. The further back he releases, the less likely he is to be blocked.
Natural skill played a role in developing such movements, but Curry had to develop a lot of his tendencies due to his smaller weight. Where some players see a lighter weight as a weakness, he used it to his advantage and became much faster than everyone else.
Final Words
Curry is not the tallest point guard in the NBA. While he’s commonly associated with threes, there’s no doubt his driving ability is a big part of his game. His small size, along with his stellar body control, is a big part of that.
While there’s nothing wrong with putting on extra weight, doing so would hold Curry back and prevent him from playing his game. Staying light informed all of his on-court decisions, and it allowed him to develop into the incredibly shifty player he is today.
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