Why would Westbrook, Durant take shots at Curry?

OKLAHOMA CITY – If Russell Westbrook is a tornado, as Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr described the Oklahoma City Thunder point guard recently, then Stephen Curry is a basketball earthquake.

He simmers beneath the surface before the eruption comes, the force unleashed by all those shifts in the soil beneath that remain a secret until it’s too late. We saw this all throughout the Warriors’ historic season, when he rarely spoke of all the offseason slights that fueled him – the talk that they lucked their way to last season's NBA title against Curry stopper Matthew Dellavedova and those undermanned Cleveland Cavaliers, or how the players voted James Harden as the “real” MVP, or the anonymous general manager’s survey that was so dismissive of he and the Warriors – but exacted revenge with his play.

Healthy Kyrie Irving, Kevin Love give LeBron James 'a different feeling' for NBA Finals

As the Warriors try to stay alive Saturday night at Chesapeake Arena in Game 6 against the Thunder in the Western Conference Finals, they’re hoping against hope that there’s at least one more Curry quake coming.

All of which made it so confusing when Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant decided to take a jackhammer to Curry’s fault line after Game 5 on Thursday night.

By being so openly critical of Curry at such a crucial time – Westbrook chuckling when he was asked about Curry as a defender, Durant responding with such candor and condescension – the Thunder stars have brought this story full circle.

Russell Westbrook laughed when asked if Steph Curry is an 'underrated defender'

Curry became who he is today by silencing critics at every step, from the folks who said the Charlotte, N.C. native was too small and too soft to play for top colleges to the ones who saw him as nothing more than a shooter at the NBA level. But this is an old subplot at this point, the kind of thing that gets recycled as context during the latest MVP ceremony but that should play no part in the throes of a back-and-forth series like this.

Unless, of course, the very opponents that Curry & Co. are trying to take down think it a novel idea to strike those familiar chords some 48 hours before they go toe to toe again.

All day on Friday, the focus in most circles was about Curry’s defensive abilities and how much truth the Thunder’s dynamic duo may have spoken. There were statistical breakdowns of Curry’s defensive evolution over the years, deep-dive discussions on those Mark Jackson days when Curry was always being hidden by Klay Thompson. Then there was talk of Kerr, who began his era with a strong message that Curry should spend more time guarding his position. That led to analysis of how he’s doing in this series against Westbrook.

But the real crux of the issue here isn’t about the importance of steals (he had five in Game 5 and led the league in steals during the regular season at 2.14 per game) or the number of blow-bys (not as many as you might think). It’s about respect.

Why is it, at this point in Curry’s career, that his contemporaries are still so determined to denigrate his talents? This was a whole new level, like a live stream viewing of that infamous Players Association MVP vote from last summer. But from Oscar Robertson to Charles Barkley to all the Curry cynics in between, it was a tone that many had taken before.

The blame-the-media answer simply doesn’t fly, as he’s hardly the first MVP to be championed at every turn by a press industry that has always celebrated, well, champions. LeBron James had his own special kind of hype long before he went on to win two titles – back in those days at St. Vincent-St. Mary when he graced the cover of Sports Illustrated – but you don’t hear fellow All-Stars making public cracks about his semi-broken jumpshot.

It’s a strange phenomenon, one that’s often explained by armchair psychologists as a product of jealousy or good, old-fashioned machismo. But the why doesn’t matter at the moment. The question now is what, if anything, he’s going to do about it.

“I've got a great teammate that's obviously a better defender on the perimeter,” Curry said of Thompson after Game 5 when he was asked about Durant and Westbrook’s reaction. “I like the challenge. I'll do my job the best I can. That's what I'm out there to do. So in those situations, I don't get too caught up in the one-on-one match-up. My job is to follow the game plan, and I've done that the last four years of my career trying to elevate my defensive presence and do my job.”

If he does his job on Saturday night, the stage will be set for an epic Game 7. The Curry tremors, in other words, just might be coming.