Why Steph Curry’s end-of-season admission can’t be ignored by the Warriors

Navigating Steph Curry’s mind right now is much more interesting than the offseason months in between five straight trips to the NBA Finals. By the second or third straight year of grinding through the regular season for three more months of basketball, it starts to get routine. This is different. This has been different.The difference is, Curry seems to know it now more than ever. Curry isn’t part of the season that needs him most and still fuels his engine. The year before, an injury to him in the second round of playoffs ended his and the Warriors’ season. A year later, the playoffs can’t even be part of his vocabulary, mainly because of an injury that sidelined him for more than two straight months – on top of two other brutal injuries to the Warriors, most notably Jimmy Butler’s torn ACL 11 days prior to Curry’s problems with runner’s knee. On top of all that, Curry still is trying to understand if his Hall of Fame coach is walking away after 12 seasons together. The only way Curry could describe the Warriors’ season after their NBA play-in tournament loss to the Suns in Phoenix was as a “roller coaster ride, to say the least.” Curry said the Warriors realistically had their sights set on chasing home-court advantage knowing where they were the previous season after trading for Butler. In reality, they were a top-four team in the Western Conference the first 10 days of the season and then never again. He then mentioned Butler’s season-ending injury, which was a prelude to Curry missing 27 straight games and Moses Moody going down to a horrific torn patellar tendon on March 23. Butler grabbing his knee ended the Warriors’ season. The injuries to Curry and Moody were somehow the cruel aftermath. “You see just momentum slipping away,” Curry said. The Warriors won 12 of their last 16 games when Butler’s season ended. They also never got higher than the No. 8 seed in that stretch. It then took them more than two months to win consecutive games again without Curry and Butler, and those wins came against the 23-win Dallas Mavericks, 17-win Brooklyn Nets and the 17-win Washington Wizards. They never won back-to-back games the rest of the season. Instead, the Warriors followed that three-game win streak by losing seven of their final eight games of the regular season without any real consequences in the standings. “But there is still this underlying belief that when it comes to the Warriors, you always talk about championships,” Curry continued. “That’s what we’ve established as a goal. But when we had to reshape that, it’s like, OK, can we just make something out of this year to get a playoff experience and playoff berth? That felt like the right goal, and why I forced my way to try to get back. For us to have that moment we did in LA, the highs of that and the lows of tonight, it’s just what basketball is, what basketball is about, what sports is about. “You never know what’s gonna happen, but you give it everything you have. And for us to have had these last three, four days, the whole play-in situation, I’m proud of the way we finished it, because it could have been very sleepy. Like I come back and we get blown out in the first game, and everybody kind of just goes into the summer with no real direction. It was a fun ride these last four days.”There’s never a one-word answer from Curry. He’s thoughtful with his words and gives expansive answers. Sometimes, there are a lot of words without too much substance to parse through. Other times, it takes listening back to divulge every word Curry says, like his 12 minutes with his season done in Phoenix. So much of what he said explains who he is. Knowing the championship responsibility that comes with the Warriors. Pushing to come back to feel that rush of electricity for at least one more night. The love of sports and competition. Inside all of that, Curry’s words above that hold the most weight were about the “underlying belief” when it comes to the Warriors. A few minutes later, he was asked to revisit those words, knowing that a title is always the goal and expectation, and ultimately was asked if he believes that this group can still make a push to that level of play. “Yeah, but I think we can approach it differently in the way that we build the year, because we started the year with that as an aspiration,” Curry said. “I’ve only been in one locker room for the last 17 years, and before you win the title, there was those first two years, like you’re building the foundation for what a championship team looks like, even though you had no idea what that really meant. Then you accomplish it, then everything else is based off of that. It’s been that way since 2015. “So I think we can reshape the narrative, knowing in the back of our mind that is the ultimate goal, but we have to get back to the basics of what makes a good basketball team, a competitive basketball team every single night. Realize how hard it is to win in this league, but can we rethink how we do things with the foundation that we’ve established?” His trophy case is full. The greats can always make more room. What he’ll rearrange his things for is a fifth ring. It’s all he’s still playing for at 38 years old, as he has repeatedly said. Curry has beat Father Time more than not, and he also isn’t blind to reality. “We don’t have to keep saying championship, championship, championship every day, even though we’ve experienced that,” Curry said. “It’s can we just build the foundation again with what this team needs to do with the way that the game is played now with how fast it is, how young and athletic it is. All of those things. We have to kind of put everything on the drawing board to get back to just being competitive every single night.”Fast, young and athletic the Warriors are not. Between Steph, Steve Kerr, Draymond Green and a long list of Warriors past, a standard has been built in Golden State. A new foundation, however that might look, needs to be created by getting back to the drawing board. His chase isn’t over yet. What Curry admitted also can’t be ignored.Download and follow the Dubs Talk Podcast

Why Steph Curry’s end-of-season admission can’t be ignored by the Warriors

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