The night Stephen Curry won over Knicks fans, New York City

Stephen Curry wasn’t yet what he would become that night of Feb. 27, 2013. The Warriors weren’t yet what they’d become. And hard as it may be to remember this, Golden State wasn’t the best team on the floor at the Garden that night, and it wasn’t all that close.

Knicks fans already knew Curry, of course. He was the one-man dynamo who nearly carried Davidson to the 2008 Final Four, and a year later he’d wowed the Knicks’ brass in a workout at the team’s Westchester County headquarters a few weeks before the draft. Mike D’Antoni had been so impressed by what he’d seen that day that afterward, he shook Curry’s hand and laughed.

“We can’t draft you,” the Knicks coach said.

“Oh?” Curry answered. “Why?”

“Because [team executive and former Knicks sharpshooter] Allan Houston said he doesn’t want to be known as the second-best shooter in Knicks history.”

A few weeks later, there had still been a strong belief that Curry would be available to the Knicks at No. 8. The Warriors also were clearly interested at No. 7, but both Curry’s ex-NBA-player father, Dell, and his agent, Jeff Austin, were wary of Steph landing there, with its deep history of dysfunction and losing.

Perhaps if they’d been as convincing at poker as Jellybean Bryant and Arn Tellem had been a few years earlier, history might have turned out much differently. Thirteen years earlier, on the eve of the 1996 draft, the Nets had been lasered in on drafting high school phenom Kobe Bryant with the No. 8 pick until Bryant’s father and his agent warned John Calipari that Kobe would never play for the Nets. It was probably a bluff, but Calipari fell for it; he picked Kerry Kittles instead. You might know how things worked out from there.

This time, Team Steph didn’t resort to strong-arm tactics, and Knicks president Donnie Walsh chose not to investigate any draft-night deals that could nudge the Knicks above the Warriors — specifically with Minnesota, which owned both the No. 5 and No. 6 picks, just before Golden State. So it was off to Golden State for Steph.

And between that night and Feb. 28, 2013, it was hard to be too terribly angst-ridden if you were a Knicks fan. Curry had shown clear promise but he’d also developed a pair of trick ankles; he’d been limited to just 23 games in 2011-12. The Knicks, meanwhile, were in first place in the Atlantic Division, on the way to 54 wins and their lone playoff series victory since 2000. Momentum was back at the Garden.

And technically, they won that night, too, 109-105 — Carmelo Anthony scoring 36 points, Tyson Chandler grabbing 28 rebounds. But it was Steph Curry who was the big winner, who won over the Garden and New York City. He scored 54. He shot 13 3-pointers and he made 11 of them, some of them from preposterous range.

The Garden was happy for the home team; it was ecstatic for this kid, not yet 25, who’d chosen MSG for his coming-out party.

“There was a lot of energy in that arena for both teams,” Curry said that night. “When I started putting up some numbers, when I made a couple of shots, you could hear the crowd. I was running off adrenaline.”

From that night, of course, the paths of the Warriors and the Knicks diverged so greatly, and so steeply, it’s hard to believe sometimes they compete in the same league. Just 12 days later the Warriors humiliated the Knicks at Oracle Arena, 92-63, Curry and another kid Warrior, Klay Thompson, combining for 49. Soon they would start to collect championship banners, three of them between 2015 and 2018.

The Knicks?

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Look, using 20/20 hindsight you can certainly wonder why Walsh didn’t make a stronger play to move up in the draft, but it actually seemed at the time like a huge break that Arizona’s Jordan Hill, projected as a top-4 pick, fell to them at 8 (notwithstanding an unremarkable eight-year career that included all of 24 games as a Knick).

The more classic hand-wringer what-if is to notice that the Raptors, at 9, picked a 6-foot-6 swingman out of USC named DeMar DeRozan, a career 20.0-point-per-game scorer, four-time all-star, two-time all-NBA player. Still, it’s fascinating to wonder just what would’ve happened if Curry had become a Knick in 2009. He was, after all, already friends with LeBron James; would that have made the Knicks more appealing to James during his 2010 free agency?

Would D’Antoni and Curry (and, perhaps, James) have clicked? If they hadn’t, it is entirely possible that the Knicks job might have been appealing to someone like, say, Steve Kerr, who ran toward Oakland in 2014 and away from New York. Would Walsh have stayed in New York, cutting off the Phil Jackson Follies before they were ever a germ of an idea?

Curry, for his part, admitted recently to former NBA players Stephen Jackson and Matt Barnes: “I wanted to go to New York and thought I was going to New York. At the draft — in the green room — I was like, ‘Oh, get to the eight spot and New York can get me.’”

New York wouldn’t have minded that either, as it turns out.