Chris Mullin and Steve Kerr spent a fair amount of time around Michael Jordan in the 1990s, when he was at the peak of his powers. So people notice when they talk about how the current phenomenon surrounding Stephen Curry reminds them of those days.
Mullin, currently the head basketball coach at St. John’s, welcomed Curry and the Warriors for a practice on Tuesday, and the Warriors legend got to observe Curry up close, and was struck by how people reacted to him.
“I was around Michael [Jordan] during the summer of ’92,” Mullin said, hearkening back to his time with the Olympic Dream Team, via CBS Sports’s Ken Berger. “So yeah, I think it’s at that level.”
Kerr spent the prime of his career with Jordan in Chicago, and he agreed.
“Michael would just draw crowds everywhere he went,” Kerr said. “When we’d get to a hotel in the middle of the night, there’d always be 50-100 people waiting out there at 2 a.m., hoping for an autograph. People come before games to see these guys warm up; it happened with Michael, and it happens now with Steph. There’s sort of a fascination with Steph that reminds me a lot of people’s infatuation with Michael.”
In Philadelphia, a rope line was required to keep all the fans at bay who had arrived early just to watch Curry warm up. Team officials told Berger that the biggest crowd was in Denver, where hundreds arrived early just to see the pregame ritual.
Kevin Garnett has already made this comparison. Are Jordan and Curry the same player? Absolutely not. But they both command a sort of following unlike any other player in the NBA and have an inimitable style of play all their own, and in that regard, the comparisons aren’t misplaced.
