Stephen Curry is arguably the most important name in all of sports right now.  Let us count the reasons why . . . OK, we’re done counting . . . we got four:

1. The obvious: Dude just led his team to an NBA championship after winning regular season MVP;
2. The aww:  His daughter Riley has the MVP of cute kids on serious lock (although I’m biased towards this kid);
3. The good: Steph is perhaps the most* likable superstar professional sports has ever seen; and
4. The relevant: He doesn’t wear Nike or Jordan or Adidas or even Reebok . . . he balls in Under Armour.  That’s right, the Spanx-for-football is making kicks and taking names – specifically, taking signature athletes from Beaverton.

[*Unlikable superstars are far more common; and now we have an excuse to link to this clip from Field of Dreams.]

Steph has been with Under Armour since October 2013 – ever since Nike famously anointed Uncle Drew to the Swoosh Rushmore instead.  For the first half of this past season Curry wore the UA ClutchFit Drive on the court.  On January 9th, a win against the Cavs no less, Steph finally unveiled his signature shoe, the Curry One.  Under Armour has trotted out a litany of general release and player exclusive colorways in both models (24, in total) in a manner consistent with how Nike outfits its big four NBA stars.  And with that many different shoes, the possibilities abound at Campless HQ . . .

In our last post, we undertook a light-hearted analysis of NBA sneakerheads, including a rough comparison of sneaker heat to game performance.  Even assuming that sneakers might impact on-court results, the fundamental problem with that analysis is that it doesn’t account for inherent skill difference between players.  But if we had a single player to work with . . . a player who wore 24 different pairs of shoes over one season . . . well, that might be a different story.

Nick Engvall wrote a great piece last week titled Stephen Curry’s Performance in the UA Curry One Will Change The Future of Basketball Shoes. Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s already changing the future of basketball shoe data analysis.

Methodology:

It’s a proven fact that 27 & 10 will get you chicken curry at the Bristol cafeteria, and curry stew is served after 54 points, but it’s less clear what kicks lead to those stats.  That’s the goal.

We owe a huge thanks to Ben Berry from The Hoop Doctors, who collected the data for this analysis.  Ben identified every shoe Steph wore in every game (Playoffs included), and his stats from each game.  We then aggregated individual game stats by colorway to determine how Steph performed while wearing each shoe.  For example, Chef wore the Dub Nation Curry One on 3/18, 3/31 and 4/9.  We combined the stats for those three games to arrive at performance stats for the Dub Nation . . . and so on for the other 23 colorways he wore this season.

Given the full roster of game stats there is no shortage of analyses we could do with the Under Armour star.  To start, we wanted to keep it simple:  How many points did Steph score in each shoe?

Steph wore the ClutchFit Drive for the first 33 games of the season, and the Curry One for the remaining 46 regular season games (he sat out two and we couldn’t identify one).

Key Insights:

• Steph’s overall play was better in the Curry One (1.8 ppg more; 5.5% better 3 pt FG%), but team performance was slightly higher in the ClutchFit Drive (2.2% greater win percentage)
• Steph averaged 30 ppg or more in three Curry Ones, but never more than 28 ppg in any ClutchFit Drive
• Away was better than Home in both models

With that as background, let’s see how the same sneakers fared during the Playoffs.

As background, Steph averaged 23.8 ppg during the regular season, and 28.3 ppg during the Playoffs – so we should expect a general increase in ppg by sneaker.

Key Insights:

• Curry wore eight different sneakers during the Playoffs – all Curry Ones.  Six of the eight were colorways he also wore during the regular season.  Of those six, three had a higher ppg during the regular season, and three had a higher ppg during Playoffs.
• The most significant disparity between regular season and Playoff performance is the MI30, which had a 21 point differential.  In three regular season games Curry averaged only 19 points per game; but in the one Playoff game with the MI30s on, he went for 40.
• The next most significant disparity was only 4.2 ppg, and that was the Home, which fared better during the regular season.
• From a resell perspective, the most popular/expensive colorway is the MVP, a limited release shoe that dropped on June 13, right in the middle of the Finals.  It’s currently selling for around $400. Unfortunately, resell price doesn’t translate to game performance, as Curry only averaged 23 ppg in the MVP, the third worst of the eight Playoff shoes.

As a related point, the UA Curry One is starting to gain real traction on the resell market.  We currently track the Candy Reign ($170 resell value) and Dark Matter ($181) on the Campless Price Guide, and will be adding the MVP and several others on the next data refresh.

Now that we have a good understanding of points-per-game by sneaker, let’s go a little deeper.  Anyone who knows anything knows that Steph is known for raining threes – so it’s only natural to use 3 point FG% as part of our next analysis.  We debated a second stat for a while and finally decided to create an aggregate “Game Performance” calculation based on all of the relevant data points that we have.

• Game Performance = Points + 2*(Assists) + Rebounds – 1.5*(Turnovers) + 5*(Win) – 5*(Loss)

The following plots each sneaker on two data points:  3pt FG% and Game Performance.

We’ve divided the charts into quadrants.  The upper right is the best; it shows better than average results for both 3 pt FG% and overall game performance.  The lower left quadrant is the worst; it shows worse than average results for both.  The upper left and lower right show better than average results for one, but not the other.

Key Insights:

• Curry Ones dominate the upper right quadrant (6 to 2), while the ClutchFit Drive is more prominent in the lower left (5-2).  Taken alone, this suggests that Steph performs better in the Curry One.
• Steph’s best performing shoe is clearly the Curry One Splash Party.  He wore them four times, leading to the best overall game performance and second best 3 pt FG%
• The ClutchFit Drive Blizzard stands alone as the worst shoe – 20% 3 pt shooting and the lowest game performance by 50%.  It’s not even close.  No wonder he only wore them once.
• The lack of shoes in the lower right means that Steph doesn’t have many good overall game performances when his 3pt FG% is low.  The inverse, however, is not necessarily true.  There are plenty of shoes in the upper left, meaning that even when Curry is lighting it up from beyond the arc, he still might have a poor overall game.

For our final chart we’ve created the scatterplot view of 3 pt FG% vs. overall game performance, but limited results to just the Playoffs:

With fewer shoes on the board a pattern starts to emerge . . . Do the shoes line up on the diagonal axis?  Does that mean anything?

Key Insights:

• In fact, the diagonal line does mean something:  the more sneakers which sit on that line, the closer the relationship between good 3pt FG% and good overall game performance
• This seems to cut against our previous findings that Steph can have good 3 pt shooting but still have a bad game
• In short, this chart tells us less about individual sneakers than it does about the general relationship between shooting and performance in the Playoffs
• But we can still see that he performed a lot better in some shoes (Away; Splash Party), than he did in others (Reverse MVP; Home)

To recap, Steph Curry wore 24 different shoes this year and, any way you slice it, he could still beat you wearing scuba fins. Let’s be honest – it doesn’t matter what color shoes he wears – but it’s still fun to play with the data.  Our expert recommendation is to stick with the the Curry One over the ClutchFit Drive, and keep wearing the Splash Party colorway as much as possible.  Sound good, Kevin Plank?

And now we can leave you with the obligatory Chicken Curry commercial:

https://var/app/current/news-tmp-0801.youtube.com/watch?v=1ogqs4fwBkY

What do you think?  Which color do you play best in?