warriors 3 point contest and slam dunk participants (Photo: Warriors Twitter account)
NEW ORLEANS, LA — It started as a day of anticipation and confidence from not only the Golden State Warriors‘ #NBAAllStar participants Stephen Curry and Harrison Barnes, but also for #DubNation.
Curry started the day at the morning All-Star Practice session at the New Orleans Convention Center by hitting three halfcourt shots to help his team win a mini-contest between the Western Conference All-Stars in an event for the Jam Session-attending fans. We also asked him about the new format of the #FootLockerThreePoint Contest and he said he would put the moneyball rack on one of the last three stations:
Curry said that in preparation for the Contest, he’d hit scores of between 18 and 25. Even Danny Green came by, butted in for an interview, and said he was rooting for Curry…
…which would later prove to be a lie:
Let's go @marcobelinelli !!!
— Danny Green (@DGreen_14) February 16, 2014
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Curry and Paul George got the events kicked off.
The first event in which a Warrior would represent was the Shooting Stars competition where Steph, his father Dell Curry, and Becky Hammon were heavy favorites to win the “around-the-world” shooting contest.
Of course, Steph and Dell were the main reasons for the team being favored. As it turned out, only Hammon would be the one to make the critical halfcourt shot. The team went first in the competition and were quickly bested by Kevin Durant‘s team, although Chris Bosh‘s team later stole the show, thanks to Bosh’s incredible shooting.
It appeared that Steph had used all his ammo for that earlier that morning.
The next competition was the Skills Challenge in which no Warrior participated, although Curry has won that event in past All-Star Weekends. This year’s (team) champion was the duo of Oakland native Damian Lillard — his second trophy in a row for this — and Trey Burke.
Finally, the highly anticipated #FootLockerThreePoint Contest was underway. The teams were split into West and East. Curry’s West went first and it was clear that each team got to pick the order of the first round of team participants: Curry and Marco Belinelli were arguably the best shooters in the competition, and teammates Lillard and Kevin Love went first, then Belinelli, then Curry.
Unfortunately, Curry would only score 16, the worst on the team tied with Love. Belinelli scored the highest despite shooting two airballs early, and as such earned the right to advance to the final against the Eastern high-point-man, Bradley Beal. Belinelli eventually won in an “overtime” battle after tying Beal, on the strength of an impressive 24 score. Steph’s mom, Sonya Curry was caught on TV exasperated by Steph’s lackluster performance. Later, LetsGoWarriors found a copy of Curry’s scoresheet.
Undeterred, on Twitter #DubNation fans still claimed Curry as the best in-game shooter around and got ready for Barnes in the Slam Dunk Contest. In anticipation of the forthcoming events, ESPN would release graphics of all the Slam Dunk participants on Twitter.
Unfortunately, the graphic would prove to have more emotion than Barnes in real life. He had trouble completing a few dunks in the first group round and only managed to throw in power dunks while flubbing another one that made it look like a regular layup.
In the individual challenges, he was matched up against George, tried a little creativity by making it the same as a pre-planned video game dunk, but failed to convert the first two tries. So by the third try, all momentum was lost and his dunk was a watered-down version of his initial vision.
Despite it all, we’ll still celebrate the still-action images of Steph and HB, even though we know that they were far from championship-form:
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