With Team LeBron up 178-162 against Team Giannis and just 12 seconds left in the game, there was nothing for Stephen Curry to do but grab the ball following a missed LeBron James’ shot, advance the ball across half court and wait for the final buzzer.
But Stephen Curry is not a normal man. Competitive beyond measure (a trait of many professional athletes), he also is intensely intrinsically motivated toward improvement. And it is that quality that compelled him to punctuate All-Star Weekend in his hometown of Charlotte with an exclamation point.
In the current high-volume media climate, the world has moved on from the Jan. 21 game between the Golden State Warriors and Lakers in Los Angeles. In the win, in which fellow Splash Brother Klay Thompson scored 44 points, Curry attempted a dunk that didn’t go so well. But it appears everyone moved on from the failed attempt but him.
With five seconds left in the game, Curry issued a hard bounce pass to himself, displayed incredible hops and made the dunk.
Mark Medina with The Mercury News reports Curry as saying:
For all of y’all that saw me in LA, I redeemed myself. That was the best part of my night.
Curry came up short in the Three-Point Contest, and his team lost the All-Star Game. But he left an emphatic mark, on an international stage, that no one should ever question his dunking abilities again.
