PROVIDENCE, R.I. – A year ago, a game like this must have seemed so far away, so unimaginable for Sharaud Curry. It had to be a pipe dream, something he could only imagine happening at a time when his team was struggling without him, when they needed him.
It was a game many imagined happening last year, certainly. There was a time when Curry was well on his way to becoming one of the top point guards in the Big East, emerging nicely as a sophomore. With that, there were high hopes for him as a junior and for his team. But they never materialized, the result of a well-chronicled foot injury that forced him to redshirt after playing just nine minutes last season.
On Wednesday night, Curry was everything a point guard is supposed to be and then some. He was the reason his team won, a floor leader who found his teammates and scored when needed. Sure, he put up 22 points on 8-10 shooting from the field, knocking down three of four from behind the arc. He had four assists with just two turnovers. Still, the stat line, while not surprising, still doesn’t do full justice to the game he played.
Curry scored in several ways. He drove for two, he hit mid-range shots, he hit long range shots. He helped his team on run-outs. But most of all, he ran the team, and made intelligent decisions with the ball as he got inside the Syracuse zone and then made plays when they switched to man. Indeed, he almost always seemed to make the right decision.
While his opposite number, Jonny Flynn, had the more gaudy stat line on the night, Curry’s team got the win. He even admitted that there was a little extra motivation in going up against Flynn.
“Anytime you can play against somebody of his caliber, it’s easy to get excited for it,” said the junior guard.
There’s no question the Friars needed him last year. Without him, the offense lacked direction, as Dwain Williams and others tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to run the show. It became clear that Curry was the only true point guard on the team, and the value of a floor leader became painfully clear. And now that he’s back to being more like the Sharaud Curry of old, the kind of point guard many thought he could be, it’s clear in a positive way.
“It’s what we were missing all last year,” said forward Jonathan Kale. “He’s the key, he’s the motor that makes us run. You guys see it on the court, it speaks volumes.”
He didn’t make his way back all at once. Earlier in the season, it was clear he hadn’t fully recovered yet. He was still a step slower than before and couldn’t go by defenders to make plays, and that limited what he could do. You could see it in the early games, and the team had its struggles, although that wasn’t the only reason. They did have to adjust to a new coach and new system, too, and they had some growing pains.
But once Big East play came along, he got better. It might seem as if that gave him more adrenaline to play on, more motivation, but let’s also not forget that by that time it had been a calendar year since he had last played. He finally had the kind of time needed to work his way back, and had done so.
“I think there were some combined reasons as to why he wasn’t going earlier in the year, and I think you definitely can look to how long he was off,” said head coach Keno Davis. “The other thing is how long he had not been playing with our team. Then you throw in a new coach and a new system, you put all those things together, you don’t expect for the first week in the season for the team to look like they’ve been playing together for three or four years.”
In Big East play, Curry has jumped his scoring up to a team-leading 13.5 points per game (10.4 overall), nearly five assists per game (4.5 overall) and a 2.4 assist/turnover ratio. Though he leads in scoring, it’s because he’s making the right decisions on when to shoot, as evidenced by his shooting line on Wednesday night. He understands better what the coaching staff wants, and has re-acquired the feel for his teammates that he once had but lost by not getting to play last year and still having to recover during a lot of the off-season.
Now that he’s playing better, so is the team, as the Friars are now 6-2 in the Big East and look like one of the surprise teams. There’s reason to believe this team may win enough games to make the NCAA Tournament after all, although they haven’t played the meat of their Big East schedule yet.
It’s all something that probably seemed so far away a year ago at this time. A time when the Friars struggled without their floor leader, compared to now when they are flourishing with him.
