Kurtenbach: Steph Curry returns to a Warriors team with no margin for error
Stephen Curry is set to make $55.77 million this season from the Golden State Warriors, the most in the NBA by more than $4.5 million.
Apparently, he’s still underpaid.
Once upon a time, the Warriors used to be able to win entire playoff series without their best player in tow. But with Curry sidelined with a pelvis injury for the last two games, these Warriors — even with Jimmy Butler on the floor — haven’t been competitive against two of the league’s most forgettable teams, Atlanta and Miami.
“We definitely need 30 back,” Butler said after Tuesday night’s blowout loss to the Heat.
Curry can’t even take a week off without everything crumbling. (Remember this when it’s time for All-NBA voting.)
The two losses have knocked the Warriors back into the play-in tournament in the Western Conference standings. As of Thursday morning, they’re in seventh place, with the Clippers overtaking them thanks to a tiebreaker.
The Dubs should consider themselves lucky that was the worst of it. The other team hot on their trail—Minnesota—has lost three of its last four.
While the situation is hardly dire, the circumstances are anything but casual for Golden State. The Dubs have 10 games remaining, and they might have used up their margin for error in the two games Curry missed. The star guard is expected back in the lineup for Friday’s game against the Pelicans in New Orleans.
This is going to be a brutal fight to the finish line.
Amid all this hype and hoopla, if you’ve been looking for a reason to fade the Warriors this postseason, you have been given your answer.
The dirty little secret about the final few weeks of an NBA season is that, unlike in football, baseball, or hockey, you do not want your team to be “peaking at the right time.”
In those other sports, that right time is just before the playoffs. The best time to peak in basketball is roughly when the Warriors went on their Butler-fueled run, from after the All-Star Game to right around now.
From roughly this point of the season onwards, good teams should prioritize health and rest. You want to go into the playoffs fresh, even if it means sacrificing some seeding.
It’s much easier to say than to do, but either way, it’s not something the Warriors will be able to do this April.
No, the team’s final regular-season games will be as important as playoff games, and with such contests comes increased wear and tear. Draymond Green once told me that playoff games count triple. Let’s say a need-to-win regular season game — of which the Dubs are likely to have 10, starting with Friday’s — counts for two games.
Can a team led by three players—Curry, Butler, and Draymond Green—with a combined 43 years of experience, afford to have that kind of tread on the tire heading into the postseason?
Probably not.
This isn’t to say that the Dubs can make waves in the playoffs — should they even make the real playoffs. But this frantic run-in almost certainly limits how far they can go. That already far-fetched title run is likely off the table. At the very least, those young Oklahoma City legs should run these weary Dubs off the court.
Alas, going hard to the checkpoint is the only way to avoid basketball purgatory — the play-in tournament, where one’s stats don’t count, but the games do.
All it took was two games, sans Curry, for the Dubs to be thrown back into the mixer in the West.
It’ll likely take all 10 remaining games to dig their way out.
So welcome back, Steph.
Now save the season.