Every season tells a story. This one told several at once for the Golden State Warriors, and most of them didn’t end well.
The Dubs spent the 2025–26 season watching pieces fall off in real time. Jimmy Butler III’s ACL. Stephen Curry’s knee. Moses Moody going down in Dallas. Jonathan Kuminga in a different uniform by February. Thirty-seven wins. A play-in exit that felt like a door closing on something, even if nobody could quite name it.
That’s the record but I’d say it’s not the whole story. Because
inside all of that were flashes that didn’t belong to a 37–45 team. Nights where one player bent the game into something else, something worth watching, something that made you forget what the season actually was. This series is about those nights. I’m going to remind you of those games, each one a glimpse of who these Warriors could still be, even if they couldn’t hold onto it. Even though it was a season that slipped away, some moments didn’t.
Let me tell you about the time Steph Curry had in San Antonio back in November.
The night started with a shoe.
Stephen Curry walked into Frost Bank Center wearing Kobe 6s during warmups, the kind of statement that doesn’t need a press release but absolutely functions like one. He was a free agent from his sneaker deal, done with Under Armour after over a decade, and he chose that particular Friday night in San Antonio to quietly let every brand in the world know he was available. “New beginnings,” he told reporters before tip-off.
And then the game started, and what followed had nothing to do with new beginnings. What followed was the most ancient version of Stephen Curry there is, the one that shows up when everything else around him starts to look like a group project where nobody did their part.
The Warriors shot 28 percent from the field in the first quarter, including 16.7 percent from three, which is less a shooting slump and more a philosophical question about why they were even taking the shots. Their teammates combined for nine points on 3-of-26 shooting in the first half. Nine. The bench managed 19 points for the entire game. By the time Golden State trailed by 10 with 6:51 remaining, this had all the makings of another entry in a long, ugly road losing streak, the kind where the plane ride home feels longer than the flight actually is.
And then Curry just started cooking.
He scored 14 consecutive points to close the third quarter, turning a deficit into a two-point game with 12 minutes left. Then 10 more in a row in less than two minutes midway through the fourth, each one arriving with the calm indifference of someone who has already decided how the night is going to end and is just letting everyone else catch up to it. He finished the second half with 31 points, exactly half of everything Golden State scored after intermission, on a night essentially handed him the offense like, “yeah man, this feels like your problem now.”
The final line: 49 points on 16-of-26 from the field, 9-of-17 from three, 8-of-8 from the free throw line. The Warriors outscored the Spurs 24-13 over the final 6:42 and survived, 109-108, which is a polite way of saying Steph dragged them out of a game they had no business winning.
Now here is where the story gets good.
Two nights earlier, on Wednesday in that same building, Curry had gone for 46 points in a win. But that second game in three days was the true stunner.
Because this time, down the stretch, with the game on the line and a hostile building at full volume, Curry didn’t get to operate in clean conditions. He had to create chaos and then resolve it himself. Trailing by one with 6.4 seconds left, he baited De’Aaron Fox into a reach-in foul in transition, the kind of play that requires both instinct and a very specific understanding of when a defender is about to make a bad decision.
As he circled back toward the line, Victor Wembanyama turned to the louder section of the crowd and started waving for more noise, like he was personally trying to summon a playoff atmosphere in November. Curry saw all of it. He said so afterward. And instead of ignoring it, he walked several feet toward the crowd and mirrored the gesture right back at them, inviting more noise, not less, like he was slightly offended they hadn’t brought enough to begin with. Then he backed up and drained the free throw without a tremor.
“I think everyone expects it,” Steve Kerr said afterward.
That sentence is the whole article, if you want it to be.
Because after back-to-back 40-point performances in the same building against the same team, after willing a win out of a roster that shot 3-of-26 in the first half, his own coach wasn’t describing belief. He was describing routine.
The context around the 49 matters because the 46 two nights prior already told you the range was there. What that second game showed the range, plus the timing and the willingness to turn a bad game into a personal experiment, understanding exactly how much theater the moment could hold without ever losing control of it.
He said “new beginnings” before tip-off. He meant his shoe deal. What he actually gave the Warriors that night was something more familiar than that, something that keeps showing up no matter what version of the team is around him.
Everyone expects it.
