Submitted by Dave Crockett, Dec 6, 2006 10:41

Nice job of highlighting and verifying what I thought was happening with Curry. His mistakes (e.g., turnovers and offensive fouls) are declining and allowing him to be more aggressive. My suspicion is that on one side of the ledger the change is in Curry himself. What I've noticed in a number of the past few games is that he has continued to stay active, especially rebounding and challenging shots, even when the team has gone away from him offensively for stretches. To my mind, that is an encouraging indicator that something meaningful has changed for him. (Part of that, frankly, may be that he is finally in reasonable basketball condition.)

On the other side of the ledger I think Curry has benefited from the switch to Steve Francis as the primary initiator of the halfcourt offense. Although no one will mistake Steve Francis for Steve Nash, he is undoubtedly better at feeding the post. (Marbury, by contrast, is more adept at the screen & roll.) I often argued that one of the main reasons for Curry's astronomical turnover rate is that Marbury and Crawford frequently fed him the ball too far from the rim, often well before he'd established position. Eddy Curry is devastating 5 feet down, worthless 6 feet and beyond. You could practically see the charge or the dribble off his foot occur even before it happened. It is apparent now that Thomas--and give him some credit here--has gone beyond simply demanding that Curry receive the ball. Curry is getting the ball in better position.

An anecdote that may be apocraphyl (sp?) illustrates the difference between having Francis versus Marbury function as the primary ball handler. Allegedly Doc Rivers once complained to Magic Johnson about how turnover prone Dominique Wilkens was compared to James Worthy. Johnson said something to the effect of, "Yeah. If I gave worthy the ball where you give it to 'Nique, he'd turn it over too." Not that I'm comparing Steve Francis to Magic Johnson, but you get the point.

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