Stephen Curry strongest he's been: Trainer Q&A
WALNUT CREEK, Calif. – Brandon Payne had plenty of time to talk.
At a recent commercial shoot for Degree Men deodorant, the longtime trainer for back-to-back NBA MVP Stephen Curry was on the hardwood set from the time they left Curry’s home in nearby Alamo at 8:30 a.m. to the finish line 10 hours later. But for once, he was on the sidelines during an intense training session with the Golden State Warriors star.
As Curry was filmed doing many of the drills that they work on every day, part of this business partnership that has been going strong for nearly two years, Payne discussed Curry’s latest summer’s worth of work with USA TODAY Sports. Payne, who is based in Curry’s hometown of Charlotte N.C. but lives in the San Francisco Bay Area during the summer to train the three-time All-Star, shared his unique perspective on Curry’s frustrating Finals, the part that his right knee injury truly played in his struggles and the offseason training regimen that was put on hold for five weeks so that he could get healthy again.
Aside from a two-week run-up after his extended break, they went “pedal to the medal.” Twice a day, six days a week, the routine interrupted briefly by Curry’s Under Armour trip to China in early September. The good news, as Payne sees it?
“He’s the strongest he’s ever been,” he said with a smile.
Q: There was so much talk about Steph’s knee and the part it played in the Finals. How did you see it? How bad a shape was he in?
A: “You know, the injury he had, it wasn’t a bad injury. It just needed rest. That’s really all it was. It wasn’t like he was ever in jeopardy of having a procedure or anything like that. He just needed rest. So five weeks of rest was good.”
Q: Since then, pedal to the medal?
A: “We haven’t looked back. We haven’t talked about it. Move on, move forward. That’s not media talk. That’s legitimate. The first day I saw him after it, we both just had a moment of, ‘Well, that really sucked.’ But after that, we haven’t really talked about it. We just moved forward.”
Q: You have a different lens than the rest of us when it comes to him. What did you see as far as his play during the Finals?
A: “As bad as I wanted it to be him, it wasn’t him. Yeah. We don’t like to make excuses, and we’re not going to make excuses because all that matters is what happens in the 48 minutes when you’re on the floor. I wish it was the other version of him, the version that we saw for 82 games.”
Q: Training-wise, where did you guys try to grow and expand this summer?
A: “We’ve continued to expand our decision making training – strong, really strong. And we’ve done more structural stuff in terms of structural strength and functional strength within his legs to deal with what happened in the playoffs, and we feel really good right now. We’re in a good spot.”
Q: Anything different with him competitively this summer, in the wake of that Finals experience?
A: “It’s the same guy, because his competitive drive is always a quiet one. It’s not really outward in terms of targeting certain guys or anything like that. It’s just a quiet drive. We have one goal every day when we walk in the gym, and that is that we have to walk out of the gym better than we walked in. And if we do that consistently, over a long period of time, good things happen. And that’s really our focus every day. And he has to be competitive to get out of our drills, because the only way to finish what we do is you have to win the drills, or we’re in the gym until you do, so he hasn’t lost many this summer. (laughs)
Q: Where did you do most of your work this summer?
A: “We worked here in the Bay Area – a little bit of work in other places as he traveled. But we were mostly out here. It’s just easier now. It’s better for him and his family, for me to come out.
Q: Did you guys ever watch the Finals tapes together?
A: “We won’t. We’re moving on. We’re moving on. I’m not lying to you. It’s one of those things where we know it happened, right? We don’t have to (watch it). We know what happened, and we have a pretty good handle on why it happened. We’ll just focus on getting him ready for 82 games.”
Q: Anything training-wise this summer because of (Kevin Durant) being part of the equation now. Does that change anything with Steph’s work?
A: “Not so much. More of our adjustments come in the form of, we take a look at what teams did to have success against him, and we try to train to prepare for those types of situations. It’s a copycat league, and what certain teams did in the playoffs – if you just eliminate the questions about health but (focus on) what they did that had success – automatically other teams are going to try to replicate that. With the way they defend ball screens, with the way they’re guarding him off the ball, so we’re more of trying to prepare for that and have answers for that.
“We constantly work on creating space, and that’s something we’ve continued to do this year, but we’re doing it in some different ways and maybe some different spots on the floor that we haven’t emphasized in the past just because we haven’t had a need. But now we’re trying to expand the ways that he can score.”
Q: Who jumped out at you in terms of teams being effective against him?
A: “You know, I think some of the stuff where teams were effective was stuff that I don’t even think they planned for. They were just things that happened within the game and they just happened to work. Because if you look back at the Finals two years ago, he was 7-for-7 (shooting) on ball screens where Tristan Thompson switched onto him – 7-for-7. And this year he struggled. We know why (laughs). It’s more situational where teams had success.
“I think Oklahoma City had a good game plan in a couple of the games in the playoffs, but for some reason they went away from that – I don’t know why they did. The way they were corralling, so we kind of worked on just reading the floor a little bit better, looking for other opportunities to score once he gets the ball up and ways to do that.
Q: Some lessons learned from the OKC series? Their length certainly seemed to bother him.
A: “We’ve really worked on combatting length every offseason – different ways to neutralize it, different ways to try and manipulate defenders’ hands. One of the big things we look at is when a defender drops his hands, and making sure that we put big guys in a position to where they have to drop their hands to open up the shot. So we talked about doing that a lot this year, we worked on it quite a bit.”
“There’s three things that we’re looking for when he gets head up on somebody. The first thing we’re looking for is the position of the nose in relationship to the rest of their body. Is their nose off to one side or the other? Because if it is, then we know he’s going to attack one way or the other. So we’re looking at nose positioning, and we want to make one foot drop, and both hands drop. If you do that, you know where the shot is. If they don’t, then we have ways to space side to side. But we’re looking at nose positioning, foot, hands drop, shot.”