Seth Curry has reopened one of the loudest Stephen Curry legacy debates by questioning when fans started caring so much about Finals MVP.
The timing makes the point easy to decode, because 2015 remains the first major split between Curry's team success and the award voters used to explain it.
It also raises a fairer question than the one usually thrown at Steph: did the award become more important, or did social media simply make the argument impossible to escape?
In a Threads post , Seth Curry pushed back on the latest wave of debate around the Finals MVP award.
"I'm seeing a lot of Finals MVP talk. Who cares. Growing up, I never heard anybody talking about Finals MVP. Started around 2015 for some reason."
The reason is not hard to find. Stephen Curry won his first title in 2015 as the regular-season MVP and engine of the Warriors , but Andre Iguodala won Finals MVP after Golden State beat Cleveland in six games.
Iguodala's case was tied to his defense on LeBron James and the lineup change that helped turn the series. Still, Curry receiving no votes became a lasting talking point for critics who wanted to argue he was not clearly the Warriors' No. 1 option.
Photo by Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
That argument grew louder when Kevin Durant joined Golden State and won Finals MVP in 2017 and 2018. Durant was brilliant, but those awards gave Curry detractors an easy shortcut: three titles before 2022 and no Finals MVP.
The problem is that Seth's statement is not literally true. Finals MVP mattered long before 2015, even if the modern internet turned it into a sharper legacy weapon.
Magic Johnson winning the 1980 award while Kareem Abdul-Jabbar missed Game 6 has been debated for decades. Kobe Bryant 's early Lakers titles came with Shaquille O'Neal taking Finals MVP, and that shaped both players' legacies.
The wider history also cuts against using one award as a simple hierarchy chart. Jayson Tatum won the 2024 title without Finals MVP, while Shaq, Kobe, Scottie Pippen, Larry Bird, Kareem, and Magic all had championship seasons where someone else took the trophy.
That does not make the award meaningless. It makes it limited.
Seth is right that 2015 changed the volume of the Curry argument. He is wrong that nobody cared before then. The smarter read is that Finals MVP has always mattered, but Curry's 2015 snub made it feel personal, permanent, and much harder to ignore.
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