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How do you solve a problem like basketball pro Stephen Curry—the guy breaking records for consistently scoring three-pointers? Note that the question here is not how to defend Curry. That’s a problem for other people, and we wish them the best of luck with that! But how do you write about a player with Curry’s peculiar skillset? Badly, for the most part. At some point over the last year, the phrase “it’s a cliché to call these video-game numbers” appeared on an NBC Sports page. Like primeval ooze, the phrase spread across NBC-affiliated sites, hidden in alt-text and metadata. Though you can’t read that precise phrase in a single article, it appears in thousands of results. Like Stephen Curry, the line of text has achieved a strangely mechanical form of sentience. The videogame numbers meme is silly (we shall return to that shortly) but it is in the news again because NBA 2K gameplay director Mike Wang recently gave an interview to Forbes in which he said that the reigning MVP’s recent performances cannot be fitted in the game’s model of how basketball works. Curry has not really broken the game, as has been widely been reported. If you pick up a copy of NBA 2K this afternoon, it will still be fully functional. A functional game, however, cannot imagine three-point prowess as is currently being seen in the bay area. (At the time of writing, Curry had just set an NBA record by hitting a three point shot in the 128th consecutive game.) The game, in other words, is broken in the same way a crisp crossover is said to break a defender’s ankles.

(via How Stephen Curry is changing the game design of basketball | Kill Screen)