At his NBA peak, Monta Ellis was a relentless, rim-pressure guard who enjoyed four separate seasons in which he scored at least 20 points per game. At his NBA peak, Steph Curry was the greatest 3-point shooter in the history of basketball; a bona fide pioneer who permanently changed the way one of the world's most popular sports is played, while serving as the MVP-caliber talisman for four Golden State Warriors championship teams. He is a franchise legend, an icon the Warriors will almost certainly construct some sort of statue out of his likeness years after he retires.
Yet Ellis, apparently, thinks their talent is comparable.
While talking about his background after becoming Alcorn State's new basketball general manager on Friday, Ellis claimed
the only real difference between himself and Curry during their respective Warriors careers was that Curry played with stacked teams capable of making NBA Finals runs year in and year out. Whereas the best Golden State team Ellis ever played was a 42-win squad that upset the top-seeded Dallas Mavericks in the first round of the 2007 playoffs.
At a surface level, Ellis does have a point. In his prime, Curry shared the floor with three other surefire Hall of Famers in Draymond Green, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant. That definitely helped Curry be himself and focus on what he does best. Ellis never played with anyone like that in Golden State. What's funny is that the Warriors didn't think Ellis and Curry were comparable. If anything, they clearly thought Ellis would get in Curry's way as he blossomed, which is why they traded Ellis in 2012 as Curry was finishing up his third NBA season.
And again, Ellis was a dime-a-dozen rim-pressure guard we've seen so many times before. Curry, even now at his older age, sometimes remains unguardable because of his transcendent shooting ability that another player may never replicate. I'm sorry, but there's no way, shape, or form that these two would've ever been interchangeable on Golden State teams that reached the NBA's tallest summit.
More from ESPN:
"Real people that know basketball and all that, they know that. They know the [Warriors] team that I was dealt with. If you switched me and Steph [Curry] out with the [Warriors] team that won the championships, it'd be the same thing. So you've got to take the good with the bad, and that's cool. It put me in a position to make money for me and my family. I ran with that."
I'm so curious to learn who "real people that know basketball" are in this case because I'd venture to guess no one with a big name would attach themselves to an opinion asserting Ellis's talent was ever comparable to Curry's in any way. Or, really, anyone who likes and knows basketball.
Kudos to Ellis for the new gig and for parlaying his still-successful NBA career into the life he's built. He can't get what happened between his tenure with the Warriors and what happened in Curry's twisted, though. Not one bit.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Monta Ellis made laughable statement about his interchangeability with Steph Curry
