Chef Curry

In 2014, Drake dropped “0 to 100 / The Catch Up” with the line about cooking with the sauce. Fans immediately applied it to Curry’s shooting — the wrist flick, the logo threes, the pull-ups from distances that shouldn’t work. He ran with it. The chef hat merch appeared. The celebration got a name. The cooking became a brand.

What started as a rap reference became the most accurate description of how Stephen Curry shoots a basketball: deliberate, repeatable, from anywhere on the menu.

That Stephen Curry “cooks” defenses — his shooting is so precise, so high-volume, and so from-anywhere that it resembles craftsmanship rather than athleticism.

The Shot Quality pillar exists in APEX specifically to capture what raw efficiency metrics miss: difficulty-adjusted shooting, penalized by usage when the volume gets reckless. Curry’s Relative TS+ numbers are historically the highest recorded in the APEX system. He gets cooking credit even after the difficulty adjustment, even after the usage interaction.

The “cooking” metaphor maps perfectly to what the model sees: deliberate, repeatable mastery at elite volume. The chef metaphor is analytically serious.