Stephen Curry has been incredible in this year's edition of the NBA Playoffs, averaging 4.9 threes made a game. He's already broken Reggie Miller's overall playoff record, and had done so in only 13 games (Miller's previous record came in 22). So, it seems natural to think Curry has a good chance to break Green's NBA Finals record as well. But just how good of a chance?
If the series goes to 6 games or more, Curry should be expected to hit more than 27 threes (4.9*5 = 29.4). But to determine exactly how likely he is to achieve this mark, I wrote a simulator (in Python) to simulate both the series itself and how many threes Curry makes.
Overall, he breaks Green's record 62.68% of the time, and ties it another 5.73% of the time (for a total likelihood of 68.41% that he'll finish the series as the co-record holder or better). Additionally, he'll finish as NBA champion 88.47% of the time as well.
Intuitively, the longer the series goes, the more often the record is broken:
| # of Games | Breaks Record |
| 4 | 13.33% |
| 5 | 59.04% |
| 6 | 88.15% |
| 7 | 99.00% |
That's not a misprint: if the NBA finals goes the full seven games, Curry breaks the record an incredible 99% of the time. And if each team wins at least one game, it's more likely than not that he gets the job done.
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