Stephen Curry is now 19th on the NBA’s all-time scoring list. With a stepback three against Utah, he passed Paul Pierce, finishing the night at 26,398 career points and still climbing. Another name checked off. Another Hall of Famer in the rearview. On paper, it’s just another milestone in a career already stuffed with them. In practice, this one hits a little different.

Speaking of Pierce, remember NBA Live 2002? There was something about that classic hoops title that hit different for me back when I was a young high schooler. Not the gameplay, but the bios. Those little blocks of text that turned polygons into people. And there it was in Paul Pierce’s profile: born in Oakland, playing for Boston, nicknamed The Truth. Now I know Pierce’s family moved to Los Angeles when he was still in elementary school, but for an East Oakland kid like myself scrolling through rosters, that bit of Town trivia felt like finding a secret passage.

He immediately joined several other Bay Area born players like Gary Payton and Jason Kidd as guys I would root for no matter their jersey. Pierce was never the most athletic wing of his era like Vince Carter or Tracy McGrady. He was something better for a certain kind of fan: relentlessly effective. A killer from deep before that was the default setting. Ice cold when the game slowed down. Crafty in ways that didn’t show up on mixtapes but absolutely showed up on scoreboards. And nobody lived at the line like Pierce. He drew fouls with angles, leverage, timing. Nearly nine free throws a night at his peak. That wasn’t explosion. That was intelligence. Knowing exactly when a defender was cooked and making the whistle unavoidable.

So watching him finally break through in 2008, watching him win Finals MVP, felt personal even in Celtics green. An Oakland-born player who proved you didn’t need freakish tools to dominate. Just toughness, feel, and nerve.

Around that same time, the Warriors drafted a skinny kid from Davidson with fragile ankles and a jumper people thought was cute. His name was Stephen Curry, a baby-faced sidekick to Monta Ellis, a guy who very few could have imagined would bend the sport to his will.

Sixteen years later, Curry passed Paul Pierce on the all-time scoring list and he did it with a stepback three in a fashion that would make the Truth proud. Curry also went to the line ten times against Utah, channeling Pierce’s old blueprint in his own language.

That’s the poetry. Pierce thrived by being smarter than everyone else. Curry does the same thing at 37, except his craft warps the geometry of basketball itself. Pierce pushed the three forward for his era while Curry turned audacity into infrastructure. It makes me smile that Pierce was born in Oakland and decades later Curry became Oakland’s basketball avatar. Different paths, and yet the same principles: outsmart the defense, punish mistakes, and do it in style. For me, watching Curry pass Pierce doesn’t just feel like a stat update, but rather more of a handoff. One era of Bay-born basketball intelligence giving way to the next, louder, stranger, more revolutionary version.

If you loved Pierce for being effective over flashy, for the threes, for the free throws, for the nerve, this moment keeps that spirit alive. Curry didn’t just pass him folks, he did it the Pierce way, then added a chapter only he could write.

That’s full-circle basketball swag. The Truth would respect it.