Warriors hold off Heat, Curry stars despite rare negative night (Ball Don’t Lie)

It takes a player of Stephen Curry's caliber to look good in a game that ranks as his worst of the season by at least one metric. Yet that's exactly what the NBA's early MVP favorite did in his 38 minutes during Monday's 111-103 victory over the Miami Heat at Oracle Arena. [ Follow Dunks Don't Lie on Tumblr: The best slams from all of basketball] Curry scored nine of his game-high 31 points (11-of-27 FG, 4-of-11 3FG) in the final five minutes, including a dagger three with 26 seconds remaining, to fend off the impressive Heat in what was a tight game for most of its runtime. Yet Curry also fell below an important threshold for the first time this season by finishing with a minus-3 for his first negative plus-minus of the 2015-16 season so far. Curry had previously broken even in the Warriors' December 12 loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, the team's first of the season . It bears mention that plus-minus is often a vague indicator of a player's performance, particularly when it covers only one game's worth of minutes. Yet Curry's previous game-by-game numbers are absurd enough to be meaningful — he has finished with a zero or single-digit positive in only five of 35 appearances, or...