One night after Seth Curry’s Portland Trailblazers outlasted the Denver Nuggets in quadruple overtime, big brother Steph Curry heads to Houston looking to take a 3-0 stranglehold over the Houston Rockets in the other Western Conference series.
If you’re not a hardcore hoops fan, you’re forgiven if you didn’t know that superstar Steph even has a younger brother, nevermind one who also plays in the NBA and has a name that sounds almost exactly the same. Despite the many similarities, their careers have been drastically different up to this point.
Big brother’s list of accomplishments is long and illustrious — three NBA Championships, two MVP awards, a seven-time NBA All-Star, the 2016 scoring champion, as well as holding the record for most regular season three-pointers (402) and playoff three-pointers (98).
But despite coming from the same basketball-rich bloodlines, little brother Seth hasn’t found anything close to the same type of success.
Separated at Birth?
GettySeth Curry #31 of the Portland Trail Blazers looks on.
It’s hard to explain how the two brothers’ NBA career paths have diverged so greatly, given the fact that they’re both sons of former NBA shooting guard Dell Curry.
While Steph, three years the elder, has racked up countless accolades and is favored to collect a fourth NBA Championship this year, little brother Seth has toiled in relative anonymity, although he has flashed potential throughout his six-year career.
He’s never even been able to stick with one team for more than a year. After playing in just three total games for the Memphis Grizzlies, Cleveland Cavaliers, and Phoenix Suns over his first three seasons, Seth finally found some traction as a Sacramento King in his fourth year, appearing in 44 games and starting nine of them. It was off to Dallas the next year, where he’d set career highs games started (42), minutes per game (29), field goal percentage (.481), assists per game (2.7) and points per game (12.8).
He looked like the real deal for stretches of that season. Between January and February of 2017, Seth averaged 16.7 points per game (PPG) while shooting .519 from the field. He also set a career high in points with 31 during a February 24th game against the Timberwolves.
But any momentum was derailed after Seth missed the entire following season with a stress fracture in his left leg. Once recovered, it was off to Portland as a free agent this season, where he played in a career-high 74 games, although his minutes played (18.9) and points (7.9) were both well down from his best year in Dallas.
With 1,781 career regular season points, Seth just needs 14,534 more to catch up to his older brother.
Mom’s Got Mad Hops, Too
Dad Dell’s exploits in the NBA fall somewhere between those of his two son’s. He averaged 11.7 PPG game over his 16-year career, peaking in 1993-94 with 16.3 PPG as a member of the Charlotte Hornets. But like Seth, he never won an NBA championship or any major awards, although he did retire as the leading scorer in the history of the Hornets franchise.
It turns out that Mom’s got some game too. Sonya Curry brought down the house when she hit a shot from half court during the NBA All-Star festivities this year.
“Oh yeah, she did her thing yesterday,” Seth said in an interview with TNT afterward. “That was at a charity event, and we had a little family shooting competition. We got everyone involved — my sister, my mom obviously, she knocked down the half-court shot, so she was going crazy.”
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Steph Curry and Seth Curry Are Brothers & Basketball Runs in Their Genes