Want the latest Bay Area sports news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here to receive regular email blasts, plus “The Dime,” our twice-weekly sports newsletter.
Back in less urgent times, when his left hamstring was hurting more than it is now and before the Warriors faced immediate playoff elimination, Stephen Curry knew this decision was coming.
He explained that he understood — less than a week ago, in his only full media session since he strained his hamstring in Game 1 of this series — that he’d inevitably start to feel better. He could close his eyes and imagine that he’d want to play a little earlier than generally expected and prescribed, especially if the Warriors faced a desperate stage. It would be an all-time fantasy scene from an all-time player: Curry swooping in out of the blue to shock the Timberwolves and save the day in Game 5 in Minneapolis on Wednesday.
Yes, Curry knew this moment — this temptation and eventually this acceptance of reality and team health and performance chief Rick Celebrini’s fair judgment — was coming.
“Eventually there will be conversations with that,” Curry said on the morning of Game 2 in Minneapolis last Thursday when asked about weighing the risk of a premature return against the Warriors’ playoff survival. “There has to be a natural healing process that happens. The body will tell you, even if you’re able to do, like, normal basketball movements pain-free and all that stuff. And I know how tricky hamstrings can be, where they can fool you and think that it’s healed, even you don’t feel anything.
“So that gray area is a little confusing or will be confusing, I’m sure. But I’ll do everything in my power to get back as soon as possible.”
There was hope back then, but there was also comprehension that Curry is too valuable and hamstring recoveries are too unpredictable to make any panicky decision. At the end, there really was no gray area, if you thought it out carefully. There was only risk. Too much risk.
So on Tuesday afternoon, while the Warriors’ flight was approaching Minneapolis, the team officially ruled out Curry for Game 5 on Wednesday. If the Warriors lose, they will be eliminated with Curry on the sidelines — which is every team partisan’s nightmare. They won’t get the extra three days off before the scheduled Game 6, when Curry would have a much better chance to play. They could be looking back on a lost chance to run through the playoffs this season — if not for Curry’s injury — in one of Curry’s final prime years.
But this was the decision that had to be made and it had to made early. No grand mystery leading to a game-time announcement. No feints and hints. No extra teasing.
“That’s been the expectation all along,” Steve Kerr said on a Zoom call Tuesday.
The Warriors announced the day before the game, Kerr suggested, because the decision to take Curry out of consideration was so obvious.
“I didn’t have anything to do with when the announcement would be made,” Kerr said. “All I knew was there was no way he was playing tomorrow. So that was not a surprise to me that we deemed him out. That was kind of a foregone conclusion.”
Really, the Warriors had to remember that next season needs to be maximized, too. They want Curry as healthy as possible going into this offseason, not working through a re-aggravated or torn hamstring. They want him on a full workout schedule; they can anticipate he’ll be even fresher than he was at the start of this season after a summer at the Olympics. And they can believe Curry has at least one more great season in him — added to Jimmy Butler’s first full season with the Warriors.
Most viscerally, they don’t want him to go through anything like Kevin Durant’s anguish and long comeback after tearing his Achilles in the 2019 NBA Finals, his last game as a Warrior. Or what the Celtics and Jayson Tatum are going through now, a day after Tatum tore his Achilles and cried as he was wheeled out of Madison Square Garden. Injuries are impossible to avoid. Competitors want to play no matter what. But reckless decision-making has no place in the playoffs.
“If he’s in a place where he can play, I’m sure he will,” Draymond Green said after Game 4. “Him and Rick and everybody will figure that out. But we don’t need Superman. Gotta play the long game. If he can, we know he will. But there’s no pressure. We’ve got to figure out how to win whether he plays or not.”
Can the Warriors win Game 5 without Curry? It doesn’t seem likely, but there’s always a chance. They won Game 1 at Target Center with these same players after Curry went down early in the second quarter. And there were some miniature signs on Monday that it’s possible. They held the lead at halftime before the Timberwolves’ third-quarter blitzing. The Warriors have some players who can make shots, they’re just not doing it right now. They have Butler, who has won a lot of playoff games almost by himself, and presumably he won’t be as sick as he was on Monday. They won Game 7 in Houston (albeit with Curry) when they could’ve easily folded.
But the Warriors need Curry to move deep into this postseason. They always need Curry. A healthy Curry, that is.
In the larger NBA context, the door to a fifth championship of this era is still open. If the Warriors can find a way past the Timberwolves — who have only turned it up in this series for a few stretches — they would walk into a conference finals landscape that likely will be without the defending-champion Celtics or the East No. 1 seed Cavaliers (playing on Tuesday with their season on the line) and they would be matched in the West against either a surprisingly iffy Thunder team or the up-and-down Nuggets.
But none of that has caused Curry’s hamstring to heal any faster. None of that is significant to the Warriors if Curry is hurt again and out of the playoffs for good. The Warriors and Curry made the right call on Tuesday, they made it quickly, and they cleared their minds for the goal ahead. They have to win Game 5 without Curry or the season is over. There is no mystery about that and now there’s no drama about his status. Really, there never was.
The way Curry and the Warriors were playing before he reached for the back of his left leg in the second quarter of Game 1 in Minneapolis, would anybody have been heavily favored to stop them? That’s why Curry was so devastated by this injury. That’s why the whole franchise isn’t in a good mood right now and might not be again until Curry is back out on the floor, maybe not until next fall.
But this wise decision was made because everybody on the Warriors remembered that they want another good chance next season, too. And more seasons after that. As many seasons as they can get with Curry, his hamstrings, and an era that should not be cut short by desperation.