Stephen Curry and the Golden State Warriors went up against the NBA’s best defensive team tonight, and that San Antonio team is also the clear second-best team in the league … and Curry and the Warriors destroyed the Spurs, 120-90.

Curry played only 29 minutes but scored 37 points on 12-for-20 shooting, including 6-for-9 accuracy from three-point range.

Which led to my deciding that Curry might be the best thing that has happened to American basketball since Michael Jordan.

Curry not only is very, very good, he seems to be out front in changing the way Americans look at a game they consider their own — and a game they believe they know better than anyone else.

As long as the three-point shot is going to remain in the game — and it pretty clearly is going nowhere — it would behoove Americans to get away from their fondness for the old game and embrace the new one.

That is, get over the fascination with the dunk, and with power moves around the basket and focus on accurate shooting from long range.

Curry, who is shooting 45.6 percent from deep (which is better than the overall percentage by all but 49 players in the NBA), could be the man who inspires a home-grown generation of perimeter players — which ought to go a long way toward emphasizing U.S. leadership in the game.

From about 1980 through 2010, it was widely believed a team couldn’t win without dominating the game in the five feet around the basket.

And the play that epitomized that assumption was the dunk.

Everyone had to dunk. The more spectacular the dunk, the better, and the bigger the crowd reaction.

American playgrounds were overrun by guys dunking on each other while the most basic of scoring skills — accurate shooting from 15 feet and out, including free throws — was often neglected.

It wasn’t like the Rest of the World suddenly caught up with the American game and passed it, but we saw just enough examples of how the European game could beat the American, and it was based on shooting three-pointers.

It was not at all clear when the Yanks were going to embrace the long ball (and making free throws).

At the 1988 Olympics, U.S. collegians lost to the Soviets in the semifinals, finishing third, and were third in the 1998 Fiba Basketball World Cup (played without NBA players, because of a lockout).

America’s NBA guys were humiliated at the 2002 world championships, finishing sixth. They lost to Argentina, Spain and eventual champions Yugoslavia, all of them teams with plenty of three-point shooters who spread the court and avoided getting into dunking contests.

Something similar happened at the Olympics in 2004, when a U.S. team with few options beyond the arc lost to Puerto Rico, Lithuania and, in the semifinals, to Manu Ginobli and Argentina, 89-81, settling for bronze.

American coaches, especially Gregg Popovich, started to come around on the need for three-point shooters, and a few guys who made their reputation from deep — Ray Allen and Reggie Miller — came along.

But not until Stephen Curry made shooting long shots a way of life did we get any sense of a sea change in the American approach.

Curry, who has exactly two dunks this season (but shoots 91 percent from the line), has made it cool to shoot from beyond the arc, and him making three after three seems to be the stuff of top highlights on ESPN and other networks.

Last week, ESPN did about 90 seconds — which is a long time for them — showing how Curry swished a shot from about 60 feet, a second too late in the first quarter to count, and banking in a shot from half court to end the third quarter.

Curry does that sort of thing all the time. He clearly practices half-court shots and doesn’t just fool around with them.

He also is highly skilled at catching and shooting threes, as well as coming off a screen, pivoting and casting off from deep.

Curry and the Warriors are the story in the NBA, for the second-year running and, barring an injury, Curry is going to win the MVP award for the second year in succession, despite being “only” 6-foot-2 and maybe 190 pounds — and perhaps dunk-impaired.

A generation ago, a rougher NBA might have beaten down Stephen Curry, or he might never have played for a coach who saw the potential of focusing an offense around Curry’s shooting skills.

It is happening now, and that bodes well for U.S. hoops.

Plenty of young guys can see, by watching Curry, that the three is worth mastering, and can make a guy a winner as well as very well compensated.

A dunk now and then is fine, but a three is 50 percent more valuable on the scoreboard, which Stephen Curry has brought home to the slow-learners around the American game.