Ever since Steph Curry burst onto the national scene in the 2008 NCAA Tournament, he’s been one of the hardest players to guard in basketball. He’s got a relentless motor, a strong handle and a lightning-quick release when he shoots. It’s led to the same question night after night after night for the past 15 years: Is there a “Curry Stopper” out there in the basketball world?
The answer is … not really. Some have worn that mantle for some stretches of time — looking at you, Matthew Dellavedova, Avery Bradley and Jarred Vanderbilt — but usually Curry still comes out on top in the end.
There’s one player who stands out, though. And in a twist of fate that Curry didn’t even realize until SFGATE approached him about it, Curry still has a connection with him. That’s because the first player to ever earn the “Curry stopper” label was College of Charleston’s Antwaine Wiggins — cousin of Curry’s Warriors teammate Andrew.
“He was arguably — not arguably, definitely — the best in the Southern Conference,” Curry told SFGATE of Antwaine Wiggins. “He was tough.”
This is the story of Curry’s wild junior year at Davidson, the player who prevented Curry from going back to March Madness, and the Warriors connection that remains to this day.
Curry’s lost season at Davidson
Curry entered the national spotlight in 2008, with his sensational play during Davidson’s run to the Elite Eight. That story was the subject of a documentary that Curry’s production company, Unanimous Media, released last summer.
What “Stephen Curry: Underrated” breezed past, though, was that Curry actually returned to Davidson for his junior year and the ’08-’09 season, instead framing the end of the 2008 tournament as the end of his college time. SFGATE asked Curry why the film chose to skip past his junior year.
Stephen Curry of the Davidson Wildcats directs the offense against the Kansas Jayhawks during the Midwest Regional Final of the 2008 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament at Ford Field on March 30, 2008, in Detroit, Mich.
Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
“The format of the story we were trying to tell [with] that year, I guess the whole career arc … we’ll dive into that later,” a smiling Curry told SFGATE after a Warriors practice this fall.
That junior season showed what happens when a superstar at a tiny North Carolina college becomes a household name. “It was like the Rolling Stones,” Matt Matheny, then a Davidson assistant coach who was “instrumental” in recruiting Curry to the school, told SFGATE.
Curry and the Wildcats entered the ’08-’09 season ranked No. 20 in the AP Poll and played some blue bloods all across the country. But the roster Curry had was far different than the one he took to the Elite Eight.
“That whole year, I was trying to play point guard and shooting guard,” Curry told SFGATE. “… We had lost three seniors who were significant to our tournament run, so it was kind of a different experience for sure.”
Still, there were plenty of highlights. In November, Curry scored 44 in a 4-point loss to No. 12 Oklahoma and their freshman superstar Blake Griffin, then scored 44 again a few weeks later in a 5-point win over NC State in Charlotte. Three days after that, he added 27 points in a 3-point win over West Virginia at Madison Square Garden. He played on national TV against No. 13 Purdue, and again at No. 2 Duke, scoring 29 in front of the Cameron Crazies.
There was also the famous game against Loyola University Maryland right before Thanksgiving. The team decided to play a triangle-and-two against Curry at all times, essentially doubling the shooter as soon as he crossed midcourt. Curry took three shots as the Wildcats crushed Loyola by 30, a display Matheny said is still an excellent example of Curry’s “character and his selflessness.”
None of those games are what Curry remembers right away, though. No, he’s still stuck on the losses, like how he didn’t play in a February loss to the Citadel because of a sprained ankle, and how Davidson dropped their next game too, to Gordon Hayward, Brad Stevens and Butler in a BracketBusters game.
And then there are the two losses that came when Steph was actually healthy: to the College of Charleston and a lengthy lefty named Antwaine Wiggins.
‘Not a lot of long wings like that’
College of Charleston’s Antwaine Wiggins, No. 44, hits a 3-pointer as The Citadel’s Matt Clark tries to block during the first half of the Southern Conference basketball tournament game in North Charleston, S.C., Friday, March 7, 2008.
Mary Ann Chastain/AP
Antwaine Wiggins, a 6-foot-7 wing out of Greenville, Tennessee, quickly became a force for CofC, starting all but one game his freshman year. Two of them were against Stephen Curry and the Davidson Wildcats.
“I remember the first time I played them, they told me he was a great player, but you know, I had to figure out the hard way,” Wiggins told SFGATE this fall from Iraq, where he’s playing professional basketball for the second year in a row. “Playing him once, I knew I had to prepare for him in a different way and I couldn’t come in and take it easy. I’d have to follow him and chase him, no matter where he go, how many screens set. So definitely one of my greatest challenges and one of my hardest guys to guard on offense.”
The first matchup between the Wildcats and the Cougars was down in Charleston on Dec. 29, 2008, in a game televised on ESPNU. Curry scored 29 points in the win. When the rematch came around on Feb. 7, 2009, up at Davidson, the game was broadcast to a bigger audience on ESPN2, and earned a little extra shine.
“One of the most famous commentators of all time, Dick Vitale, was there,” Wiggins told SFGATE. “I was excited.”
The last three minutes of the tightly contested matchup are available to watch on YouTube. You can see Wiggins chasing Curry around on every single defensive possession. On one possession with less than two minutes to go, Curry shook free, but his wide-open 3-pointer hit the side of the backboard, one of 10 consecutive field goals he missed to finish the game.
The 10th shot was the big one. Curry was fouled shooting a 3-pointer with 3.1 seconds left and Davidson down four. He made all three free throws to cut the deficit to one. A quick foul by Davidson and a split pair of free throws by College of Charleston’s Tony White put Davidson down two with 2.2 seconds left.
The potentially game-winning play really was beautiful, a series of screens designed to free up Curry as he ran the length of the court. The inbounder heaved a pass to a different Wildcat just past midcourt, who quickly hit Curry in stride. Wiggins was on his heels, having chased him all the way up the floor. Curry took one dribble before shooting the potential buzzer-beater — just enough of a delay to allow Wiggins to catch up and block the shot from behind, sealing the 68-66 win for the College of Charleston.
On the broadcast, the legendary Vitale praised Wiggins for his stellar defense. He called the final block a “great play defensively” and said Wiggins “really contained Curry in the second half.”
Stephen Curry of the Davidson Wildcats looks on during the game against the North Carolina State Wolfpack at Time Warner Cable Arena on Dec. 6, 2008, in Charlotte, N.C.
Streeter Lecka/Getty Images
It was after this game, Wiggins recalled to SFGATE, that the “Curry stopper” nickname picked up steam. Curry himself referenced “the nickname and all of that stuff,” but gave Wiggins his props: “He was 6-7, he was a lefty, he could move his feet pretty well,” Curry told SFGATE. “In the SoCon, there’s not a lot of long wings like that that you match up against. It’s a guard-heavy league, couple of good bigs. But wings, most of them were going to power conferences. So he was tough.”
A month later, the schools met in the SoCon conference tournament semifinals. Davidson entered as the three-time reigning conference champions. But thanks to Wiggins’ stellar defense, Curry only made five of 18 shots from the field, including just two of 11 from 3-point range, and the Cougars knocked off the Wildcats 59-52. Wiggins was the lead of the Associated Press’ story about the game:
“Antwaine Wiggins didn’t score a single point on Sunday night during College of Charleston’s 59-52 win over top-seeded Davidson in the Southern Conference tournament semifinals, but he lived up to his nickname.
“‘That’s the Curry stopper,’ teammate Tony White Jr. said.”
The upset ended Curry’s shot at a final March Madness bid with Davidson. He declared for the NBA draft in April. That June, he was selected seventh overall by the Golden State Warriors.
Paths diverge … until a family member enters
It’s now been more than 15 years since that matchup, but Wiggins still remembers what Curry said to him in the handshake line after the game.
“I remember the last words he told me was that I was one of the toughest defenders he had played against, which was definitely a great compliment because I knew he was one of the top players in college at the time,” Wiggins told SFGATE. “To go watch him do what he’s done in the NBA against all the greatest players in the world, it definitely makes me feel good that I went head to head with him at one time.”
Wiggins, meanwhile, would miss the next season with a torn ACL before playing two more years at the College of Charleston, culminating with a redshirt senior season in 2011-12 when he averaged 15.9 points and 6.5 rebounds per game. After going undrafted in the 2012 NBA Draft, Wiggins started a globetrotting career. He played in Brazil for two years, Argentina for one, Canada for one with the Toronto Raptors’ minor-league affiliate, Greece for three (on three different teams) and Qatar for one.
Davidson’s Stephen Curry tries to shoot the ball around College of Charleston’s Jeremy Simmons during a college basketball game at Belk Arena on the campus of Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., on Feb. 7, 2009.
Icon Sports Wire/Corbis/Getty Images
Now, Wiggins plies his trade in Baghdad for Al-Naft, one of the best teams in the Iraqi Basketball Premier League. Wiggins and Al-Naft won the Iraqi title in 2023, and he returned to the team this season.
All that time, he watched from afar as his former foe became a global superstar, leading the Warriors to three NBA championships and winning two MVPs. At the 2020 trade deadline, the Warriors made Antwaine’s worlds collide by trading for his cousin, Andrew, a move Antwaine said was “shocking” to him even though he had no doubt it would be a good fit.
“More than anything, I was happy for Andrew because I know how good of a player Steph was, but also how good of a person he was,” Antwaine Wiggins said. “Anytime you pair good players, but also great teammates and people together, there’s going to be some good chemistry and success coming from that.”
Andrew Wiggins has been a natural fit next to Curry, helping the Warriors win a fourth title as the unquestioned second-best player during the 2022 playoffs. When SFGATE asked Curry about how his teammate compares to his old SoCon rival, he took a beat to think, then laid out some similarities.
“[Andrew] Wiggs is like an extreme athlete — heard of him from high school, just kind of phenom athlete who could do crazy stuff on the court,” Curry told SFGATE. “They have the same body type, if you will, the length and the height. Antwaine, he had a slower, more methodical way about him, [whereas] Andrew’s pretty fast-twitch. Once somebody said it, it was like, ‘Oh, that makes sense’ type of vibe. I didn’t question it.”
The Wiggins cousins are six years apart — Antwaine is 35, Andrew is 29 — and weren’t in touch often early in life, though they’ve grown closer in recent years. In the past two seasons, Antwaine has actually played against Andrew’s older brother Nick in Iraq, something that the whole family finds special.
Davidson’s Stephen Curry, top, drives for the basket as College of Charleston’s Matt Sundberg gets called for the foul as he tries to block the shot during the first half of their NCAA college basketball game Monday, Dec. 29, 2008.
Mary Ann Chastain/AP
“It’s amazing, seeing those two compete, playing in the same league,” Andrew Wiggins told SFGATE about his brother and his cousin. “You don’t really get too much moments like that — honestly, you never get moments like that. So when it happens, you cherish it.”
Nick Wiggins just recently signed to play in Indonesia, meaning there won’t be any more cousin matchups in Iraq for now. Curry and Andrew Wiggins remain firmly planted in San Francisco, where they’re trying to win a fifth championship for the Warriors in 10 years.
Antwaine Wiggins, meanwhile, has his eye on hardware of his own, with Al-Naft looking to defend their 2023 title. Until he can add “repeat champion” to his resume, though, he’ll always have “Curry stopper.”
