As a player who will forever be one of the premier offensive threats in the history of basketball, Stephen Curry has continued to set new standards of excellence for himself, this time on the defensive end.

Bringing in a haul this season of NBA All-Star and NBA 75 recognition, topped off by his inevitable setting of the all-time 3-point record in Madison Square Garden in December, Curry has finally turned heads for his work on the other side of the ball.

The numbers have come around to confirm this, along with burgeoning acknowledgments from members of the Warriors and the NBA.

However, according to his long-time trainer Brandon Payne, whether or not the recognition of Curry’s defensive abilities has increased, the two-time NBA MVP has always provided quality defense for Golden State.

“Even though a lot of people might have perceived it as a huge weakness, the reality is as a team defender he’s always been very good, and he’s always been very intelligent,” Payne said. “He’s always done what he’s supposed to do away from the ball, he’s always blown up actions before the ball has gotten to the action … A lot of that goes unnoticed to most fans because they’re typically watching the ball. Even going back to the two MVP seasons, if you go back and watch, away from the ball he did a really, really nice job as a team defender.”

While not necessarily serving as an individual stat, Curry’s defensive rating of 100.8 is the lowest of any of the team’s starters, including Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins. Furthermore, the eight-time All-Star now finds himself third in the league in defensive win shares, and leads the association excluding players who have played fewer than 10 contests.

Steve Kerr rejected the reputation of Curry as a poor defender in November, going on to highlight his performance this season. And according to Green in late December, Curry was tops in Mike Brown’s defensive grading earlier in the year as a player who has made the largest leaps on that end of the court.

While Payne underlines the inherent difficulties of isolation defense in a league with a surplus of offensive talent, he also acknowledged a key change in Curry’s leadership and decision-making in recent vintage.

“I think definitely last year there’s a little bit of a shift in his leadership style as well, and a shift again this year where he’s leading by example a little bit more,” Payne said. “I think the biggest thing he’s doing now – he’s not reaching anymore. He’s not picking up two early fouls. Occasionally he does, but it used to be kind of a chronic thing with him, where he would get in foul trouble early in games, he’d pick up silly fouls by reaching, and now that reaching is not there anymore.”

With a change in defensive intelligence and the combination of desire and experience Payne said is important for a successful NBA defender, Curry has continued the visually-apparent physical transformation as his career has progressed.

Payne noted Curry only weighs a few more pounds than he did earlier as a pro (going from 193-195 lbs. to 196-197), but shared the guard’s body could potentially grow more explosive even as he has aged.

“He’s getting that ‘grown-man’ body – I know that sounds funny because he’s going to be 34 years old but he’s a little bit later developing, and that’s been the case his entire life, and that’s okay because that means he’s a young 34 years old,” Payne said. “He’s still got a lot of physical growth and development left, and that’s a good thing. That means that he’s still getting stronger, he’s still getting more powerful, he’s still getting faster, which is rare for a lot of guys that are 34 years old in the NBA.”

In order to maximize Curry’s unique and still-ongoing bodily development, Payne has utilized training methods to match his client’s individuality. No stranger to employing advanced technology to train Curry as a shooter, Payne has sought to build on Curry’s ability to defend with length and leverage with unconventional approaches.

“We don’t do a lot of “maxing”, that’s not really in the plan, it’s really more about the velocity and the stability of the movement, and just the sheer power that he moves with,” Payne said. “More than anything, it’s just putting him in unbalanced situations and requiring a lot of stability and strength in those unbalanced situations, so it’s a combination of all of that stuff. To most people, a lot of the stuff he does from a strength and conditioning standpoint would be kind of foreign, so not a lot of traditional bench or squat or anything like that, it’s a lot of things that are just specific to his body and specific to his personal development and his personal power output.”

Still, it is tough to figure out what motivates a player like Curry, who already expends a tremendous amount of energy on the offensive end and is a generational talent in terms of performance and accolades, to continue to press on to improve his defense.

Payne made it clear Curry has never explicitly expressed a desire to make an All-Defensive team either, and plenty of elite scorers in Curry’s same position resign to having defensive abilities far below their offensive standards.

Curry’s work as a defender and a player, away from much of the Los Angeles and New York five-on-five runs other players employ – which Payne said Stephen avoids – is more stemmed in a desire for maintained greatness.

“Once you’ve experienced that success, you don’t want to relinquish it,” Payne said. “Once you’ve been an All-Star, you want to continue to be an All-Star. Once you’ve won a scoring title, you kind of like the feeling and you’d like to win another one. Once you’ve won an MVP, it feels real good, you want to win another one, and certainly once you’ve won a championship, you want more. That success is still what drives him, you want to get back to that.”

And now that the Warriors find themselves back in title contention, Payne wants a potential fourth title for Curry to serve as a validation for all the work the latter devotes to his craft.

“We can all sit around and talk about how great the workouts are, and they are, we’ve done a really good job with it, he does a great job with it in the offseason, but the reality is we do that work to win,” Payne said. “We don’t work to work, we work to win. We want him to get back to that, we want him to have that opportunity, I think they’re good enough (and) have an opportunity to do that. In pro sports, the time is now, the time is always now. It’s never look to next year or two years down the road, the time is right now. And I think they have the mix, when they get healthy, they have just as good a chance as anybody to finish on top at the end of the year, and I hope that’s what happens, I hope that for him.

(Photo credit: Accelerate Basketball)