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According to ESPN's Marc Stein, Stephen Curry will win his second consecutive MVP award. Though the news is a not a great surprise -- Curry had perhaps the single greatest overall season in history -- what is shocking is how quickly we've arrived at this point. Who would have thought that an undersized, lightly recruited kid out of North Carolina would end up a back-to-back winner of the NBA's most prestigious individual award?
With this second MVP, Curry joins Steve Nash and Magic Johnson as the only point guards to ever win multiple times.
Steph Curry is the 3rd PG in NBA history to win multiple MVP awards, joining Steve Nash (2) and Magic Johnson (3). pic.twitter.com/xxUryf4nch
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) May 9, 2016
Also, Steph becomes the 11th player to ever win the award in back to back seasons, joining Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Moses Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Tim Duncan, Steve Nash and LeBron James. If Curry could somehow pull off the feat again next season, he would join Russell, Chamberlain and Bird as the only players to have won it three times in a row (although LeBron did win it four times in five years, with Derrick Rose jumping the gun in 2010-11 as voters became over-saturated with LeBron's brilliance).
Curry shattered his own record for threes made in a season, hitting a mind-boggling, eye-popping 402 three point shots this season. He led the league in scoring, and joined the exclusive 50/40/90 club, posting shooting averages of 50 percent overall, 45 percent from three and 91 percent from the free throw line.
Of course, now we wait and see when the MVP will return to the court. The timing of the award is a little awkward, given the uncertainty of when he will return to action. Either way, and regardless of what happens as the Warriors move forward through the playoffs, Stephen Curry has joined an elite, upper echelon level of NBA super-stardom.