What do you do when the greatest shooter alive admits his secret halftime ritual wasn’t extra jump shots but… doomscrolling? For Stephen Curry, the truth is stranger and maybe even funnier than fiction. He wasn’t pulling up highlight clips for inspiration or breaking down film. He was looking at your tweets.

During an interview with ABC7’s Larry Beil, Curry finally confirmed what teammates, family, and even reporters had whispered for years: the two-time MVP used to check Twitter at halftime. “It’s a long year. You got to have some fun. I need to incite some drama… just some motivation,” Curry said with a laugh. He admitted there was a three-year stretch when scrolling through criticism gave him an edge. Then he paused.

“I don’t do it anymore. There is what you call an epidemic of phones in locker rooms… I don’t want to be part of that problem.” That’s the thing about Curry. While some players take fan venom personally, sometimes dangerously so, he twisted it into fuel. Even former teammate Damion Lee recalled Steph as he typed his own name into Twitter mid-game. Hate comments?

He’d read them, put the phone down, and come out blazing. One time, a reporter even dared him to celebrate with airplane arms in the second half. Curry saw it, hit back-to-back threes, and obliged. “One time, Kerith Burke, one of the reporters from The Warriors, tweeted it right before halftime. ‘Steph, if you see this, I want you do airplane arms after you make a three… Yeah, he made like 1 three, boom. And then he made another three of them, ran down with them in airplane arms,” Damion said. Suddenly, halftime scrolling wasn’t a liability. It was part of the show. But the joke has layers.

Family podcast revelations from Sydel Curry-Lee and Cameron Brink only amplified the legend, with Brink summing him up in one line: “He’s just a big kid.” Ekpe Udoh, another former teammate, vouched for it too. “If he can look at Twitter and then come out and hit 8 threes, what you gonna say to that?” And well, who could disagree with that? Now, here’s where the story gets bigger.

Curry is 37, signed to a $62.6 million extension through 2026, and still putting up 24.5 points per game on elite efficiency. But habits matter, especially in a Golden State Warriors locker room fighting to rebuild culture post-dynasty. If their leader is glued to his phone, the trickle-down risk is obvious. Curry acknowledged that point himself, saying, “I don’t want to be part of that problem.” That matters because the Warriors aren’t coasting anymore.

Stephen Curry knows the stakes

Jonathan Kuminga is due for a risky extension. Draymond Green is still volatile. Klay Thompson is in Dallas. This is Curry’s team more than ever, and how he sets the tone matters. A little mid-game Twitter search might be harmless for him, but deadly for a younger player less equipped to handle the noise. Michael Porter Jr.’s recent admission about receiving death threats over gambling losses is the dark flip side of that coin. For every Curry who laughs off a hostile tweet, there’s another player who carries that weight home. Yet Curry’s approach reveals something fascinating about his psychology.

He’s not motivated by proving doubters wrong in the abstract. He literally wanted to read it. That’s rare for a player of his stature. LeBron James has occasionally alluded to the “haters,” but he isn’t refreshing mentions mid-game. Kevin Durant famously can’t resist burner accounts. Curry’s method was simpler: search, scroll, and turn spite into three-pointers. The irony?

The NBA’s all-time leader in three-pointers was briefly one of the league’s most reliable hate-fueled hoopers. And he kept it so casual as he said, “There was like a three-year window where I was having fun with it,” almost dismissively, as if fueling historic performances with online jabs was just a quirky side project. Now he promises it’s over.

The phones stay in the lockers. The second-half flurries will have to come from pure rhythm, not random Twitter accounts. But if we’ve learned anything about Curry, it’s that the smallest things, whether a mouth guard chew or a halftime scroll, can become cultural moments. So, what’s next? Maybe nothing or maybe… everything. Curry says he’s quit. But don’t be surprised if one night, after a slow start, he storms out of the tunnel and drops four straight threes, leaving everyone wondering if he peeked at his mentions again.