Stephen Curry's Top-5 All-Time Case Is Strong as Ever After 2024 Olympics Gold Medal (2024)

In the days and hours leading up to Team USA's 98-87 victory over France in the gold-medal game of the 2024 Olympic men's basketball tournament, an old Stephen Curry video resurfaced and went viral.

"I gotta go play for Coach [Steve] Kerr in '24," Curry told teammates shortly after winning the 2022 NBA Finals. "I gotta get something y'all got and I ain't got."

Curry, of course, was referring to the gold medal that his teammates, Draymond Green and Klay Thompson, have. And just over two years later, he's fulfilled that desire.

Team USA, in all likelihood, would not have made the championship game without him. The Americans needed every bit of his 36 points and nine threes in the semifinal against Serbia, arguably the best individual performance in this program's history.

And when things started to get tense in the final against France, Curry got on an all-time heater from beyond the arc, even relative to his own outrageous standards.

With 4:23 to play and USA up eight, he missed a three. Just under a minute later, the lead had been trimmed to six, and Curry turned the ball over. At 3:16, one more miss from Curry. The lead was trimmed to three, and you could feel the excitement of the French crowd radiating through the screen.

From that point to the final buzzer, Curry drilled four consecutive three-pointers, one of which was a fadeaway from well behind the line and over a double-team.

The barrage ended France's hope for a miracle, and it put a golden cherry on top of Curry's four NBA titles, two MVPs, one Finals MVP and his record for most threes made in NBA history.

Before this tournament, Curry had the resume of a top 10-15 player all-time. In fact, he's been in that mix for probably a half-decade or so.

Those who were particularly bullish even had reasonable arguments to have him over Magic Johnson for the title of "greatest point guard ever," and thus, in the top five all-time.

Well, now, those arguments are even easier to make.

After a slow start to the tournament—he was averaging 7.3 points and shooting just 25.0 percent from three through the first four games—Curry proved Team USA's most valuable player in its two most important contests, even if he didn't get the actual trophy for Olympic MVP (that went to LeBron James, who obviously had his own strong case).

He finished Saturday's gold-medal game with 24 points on 8-of-12 shooting from deep. He pulled that tournament-long scoring average to 14.8 points. He dragged the three-point percentage up to 47.8.

In the tournament's tightest moments, Curry turned into a blowtorch.

And adding another legacy moment like this to his already outrageous resume, again, forces us to talk about that top five.

It's hard to crack the two-man race between Michael Jordan and LeBron James up top, but Curry did top LeBron in three different Finals and became the alpha scorer at the height of the Paris Olympics.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar certainly deserves a seat at the table, as arguably the greatest center of all time, a six-time NBA champion, a six-time MVP and the game's second-leading scorer all-time.

Larry Bird, Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain are probably around this range, too. Kobe Bryant's fiercest supporters have their arguments, as well.

But the question of whether Curry should now be considered a top-five all-time player really comes down to your choice between he and Magic.

Shooting is the most important skill in basketball, and Curry's the greatest shooter of all time. Playmaking and passing can lift teammates in a way few other skills can, and Magic may be the best creator and distributor of all time.

The stats are probably close enough to consider the numbers argument a toss-up, though Curry's marks recently prevailed over Magic's in a blind poll.

When trying to analyze the NBA's all-time ladder, few things are definitive. Ultimately, it's always going to come down to the preference of the analyst or fan. Some favor scoring over passing. Some care more about defense. Some just care about how it looks when their favorite player gets going.

After Curry's summer in Paris, though, one thing is certain: He's more than earned his place in this discussion.
And somehow, it seems as though he's not done.