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MINNEAPOLIS — Steph Curry rebounded misses and dished passes into Buddy Hield’s shooter’s pocket, danced, and sporadically cracked up with Hield.
Just two days after straining his left hamstring in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals, Curry was on his feet and with his team at the Warriors’ morning shootaround ahead of Game 2.
But his presence and activity doesn’t mean he’ll be back in the lineup ahead of schedule. He made that abundantly clear.
“This is new, and from all that I’m learning about how quickly you can get back, there has to be a healing process,” Curry said. “It’s just the way the body works. You can’t accelerate it more than what it’s telling you. So it’ll be one of those after a week, really re-evaluate it every day to kind of understand when it’s safe to even think about playing, let alone how much can you push it.”
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Curry, 37, suffered a Grade 1 hamstring strain and will be re-evaluated next Wednesday. That means the soonest he could return would be a potential Game 5 back in Minneapolis on May 14, though that seems ambitious. Jimmy Butler and the Warriors will have to win at least one of their next four games to push the series to a Game 6 on May 18.
The possibility of Curry having played his last game of the season must have crept into his mind in the 24 hours between his MRI on Wednesday and his shootaround appearance on Thursday. How a precious moment at this stage of his career may have slipped away.
“Every opportunity I have now, you don’t want it to be wasted on an injury,” Curry said. “Like I’m thankful it wasn’t worse, and I’m very aware and appreciative that I have even a chance to come back. There’s been injuries around the league that you’ve seen guys don’t have that option. So I’m trying to stay in that mind frame and hope things work out where I can come back and we have a chance to keep doing something special.”
The Warriors looked like they were on their way to something special. During their quest for a fifth title of this dynastic run, the Warriors amped up their intensity over the last month of the season to rise in the standings, playing their best ball with Butler in tow. Curry and Butler led the Warriors to a Game 7 win over the Rockets in a grueling, physical series.
Houston was one of the toughest defenses Curry has ever faced in the playoffs. Minnesota looked like an excellent matchup for him by contrast. There was much more space for Curry to operate even as Wolves defenders hugged him off the ball like the Rockets did. The two-time MVP dropped 13 points in his first 13 minutes of Game 1, punctuated by a step-back 3-pointer over Jaden McDaniels.
“The way we were playing, how I was playing individually that first half, I was starting to feel really, really good about where we were at,” Curry said. “Then you kind’ve get gut-punched like that.”
The rehab process for hamstrings is tricky. It requires a lot of rest at first, then a bunch of conditioning. Curry said he knows a hamstring can “fool” you into thinking it’s healed before it really is.
Curry isn’t yet ready to even take stationary shots. At some point, there will be conversations between Curry and Golden State’s training staff about weighing the risk of further injury with how desperate he and the Warriors are to get him back on the court, but that’s a ways away, too.
For now, he doesn’t have a specific return date in mind.
“I’ll do everything in my power to get back as soon as possible,” Curry said.