The winner in the Sabrina Ionescu-Steph Curry 3-point contest is basketball

UPDATE (Feb. 17, 2024, 10:15 p.m. E.T.): This piece has been updated to reflect that Steph Curry won the historic 3-pt shooting contest against Sabrina Ionescu 29-26.

Sabrina Ionescu, a guard for the WNBA’s New York Liberty, has been asked multiple times about how Saturday night’s first-of-its-kind 3-point shootout between her and the NBA’s Stephen Curry compares to the iconic 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” between tennis players Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs.

Ionescu chuckled when that question was asked at a news conference Tuesday night. She’s 26. She wasn’t alive when King defeated Riggs in three straight sets. She wasn’t born into the world that the 80-year-old King was, a world where women athletes were treated like they were, as  college basketball analyst Jay Bilas recently put it, “lower than second class.”

Ionescu explained that her head-to-head shootout against Curry, a guard for the Golden State Warriors who’s scored more 3-pointers than anybody in NBA history, is much more “friendly” than the antagonistic contest between King and Riggs. In the 1973 tennis match, the man believed the woman was beneath him.

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Ionescu and Curry have long regarded each other as peers and have mutual respect for each other. Curry has won the NBA’s 3-point shooting contest twice. More significantly, he’s the most prolific 3-point shooter the NBA has ever seen. This season, Curry leads the NBA with 252 3-pointers made. His closest competitor, the Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, has made 181.

Ionescu made 128 threes last WNBA regular season, the most ever in a regular season. She broke the record of WNBA legend Diana Taurasi, who made 121 3-pointers in 2006. This past July, Ionescu set the record for scoring 37 out of a possible 40 points in the 3-point shooting contest during the WNBA’s All-Star weekend. That’s the most points ever scored in a 3-point contest in either the WNBA or the NBA. (Curry is one of two NBA players who’s scored 31.)

“There’s an opportunity to raise awareness, and there’s obviously many people in our society that still don’t give the respect to women’s sports and to women in general that is deserved,” Ionescu said Tuesday. “And so knowing that this is just an opportunity is sometimes that’s all you need to be able to go out there and shut a lot of people up, but also continue to thank those people that are continuing to push for what’s right.”

“Those people” include Curry, who hopped onto FaceTime after Ionescu’s record-breaking performance in July not only to congratulate his friend, but also to scheme how they could move the needle in the sports world even more.

Curry praised Ionescu’s 37 points on social media as “RIDICULOUS!” She responded, “Shoot out??”

The Stephen vs. Sabrina shootout is more than a battle between two basketball players of different genders. It’s a sign that the mission to build and grow women’s sports is more united than it’s ever been.

Ionescu and Curry have been friends for more than a decade. The Warriors were Ionescu’s hometown NBA team, and she spent part of her childhood watching the now 35-year-old Curry play. Curry followed Ioenscu’s high school career at Miramonte High School in Orinda, California, and he followed her college career at Oregon. He took his children to her college games, and he appreciated how she took time away from the court to connect with them. Curry also regularly watches his godsister Cameron Brink ball out at Stanford. But he doesn’t just show up for women’s basketball games; he’s invested in the sport as well. UConn women’s basketball’s Azzi Fudd is signed to his brand SC30.

“We’re having this moment and reshaping how people think about just competition in general,” Curry told reporters Tuesday. “You know, young kids that are in gyms and boys and girls playing shooting, playing pickup, whatever the case is. Reimagining what competition really looks like at the same time. This can kind of be a moment for that. So whatever else comes out of it, we’re gonna continue to tap in and invest in moments like these.”

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Curry and Ionescu want to change narratives that have become pervasive and harmful throughout women’s basketball, including that the sport is an inferior form of the game.

While there are men and women picking Ionescu to win — the Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo says, “I put all my money on Sabrina” — not everybody is on board with Curry and Ionescu’s vision that women’s basketball ought to be given equal respect.

Denver Nuggets forward Michael Porter Jr. said recently that WNBA players deserve about as much money as professional pingpong players. He claimed that WNBA teams “aren’t packing out arenas,” when in reality the WNBA’s attendance was up 16% and the WNBA finals were the “best-selling” finals on StubHub. He also rehashed an archaic and sexist criticism about the WNBA. “They’ve gotta lower the rims,” he said. That way, he said, more players would dunk, and for Porter that would make the WNBA something he would watch more.

Rhetoric like that illustrates that there is a risk for Ionescu if she loses to Curry or performs far below her record-breaking performance in July. While she won’t face the same level of pressure that King faced over 50 years ago, the pressure still remains. But how does Ionescu rise to the challenge that King met in 1973?

Betnijah Laney, her Liberty teammate, told me the key for Ionescu (and anyone trying to repel the negative women’s basketball narratives) is to stay true to herself.

“You have people who say they don’t watch or it’s not entertaining, but I think the numbers show otherwise, and I think no matter what you do, where you’re at, people are going to troll or have something to say, and we just gotta stay true to who we are,” she said.

And that’s what both Curry and Ionescu aim to do. On Saturday night, they’ll just go out and shoot the ball as themselves, two of the best shooters the world has ever seen.