Stephen Curry is an icon. Within the narrow context of the NBA he is the best player on the league's best team, an obvious MVP candidate who received more All-Star votes this year than any other player in the league. He is revered and relatable, or perhaps revered because he is relatable; in Curry, basketball fans find a slight, everyman-sized point guard sitting on top of the world—so dominant that he rocked the NCAA tournament while at Davidson and later conquered the NBA game despite seemingly long odds.

Most everything about Curry will soon be emulated if it isn't already. Curry's story is implicitly one of the future: His style will beg imitation and inevitably open doors for other guards who wish to play in a similar vein. It'syear, Bryant lamented the technical state of the game's young prospects while placing blame with the loose structuring of AAU basketball.

"It's stupid," Bryant said (via ESPN.com). "It doesn't teach our kids how to play the game at all so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don't know how to post. They don't know the fundamentals of the game. It's stupid."

That Curry grew up with only intermittent involvement in AAU makes him something of a case study. A young Curry played club basketball and school basketball, as most developing prospects do. Yet he also underwent private coaching from a young age to work on the mechanical specifics of his game in a way