Ten days ago, the Golden State Warriors announced they’d re-evaluate Steph Curry’s ailing knee. Wednesday, they announced there would be no good news about the Baby-Faced Assassin’s return for another 10 days.
Geoffrey Chaucer wrote that time
and tide wait for no man, and the second part of that quote seems like it’s about noted boating enthusiast Klay Thompson. Curry turns 38 on Saturday and he won’t be playing before then, nor will he be available for most of the Warriors’ brutal upcoming road trip, featuring six games in nine nights and matchups with each of the Eastern Conference’s top three teams.
Just for the record, Shams Charania wrote a truly terrible sentence in the above tweet, even for him. “Stretching his absence to five more games and a total of 20 consecutive” is the kind of thing you type one-handed while fielding calls from Rich Paul with the other hand. And you also haven’t slept more than four hours a night in case someone else announces publicly-available NBA information seconds before you do, since that is apparently worth millions of dollars per year.
Curry is apparently doing on-court work, but it doesn’t sound like he’s playing basketball yet, which is an important prerequisite for playing basketball in an NBA game. This means the Warriors will continue to lean on valuable two-way guard LJ Cryer and valuable former two-way guard Pat Spencer, but will remain an offense in search of an engine. The ragtag group of Warriors is basically enthusiastically pushing a powerless car around a track, but the upcoming East Coast swing is like trying to get said car up a hill in Pacific Heights.
How does this affect the Warriors playoff play-in chances? They’ve been passed by the LA Clippers and lead the Portland Trail Blazers by 1.5 games, but the bottom of the Western Conference is an ugly morass of injuries, tanking, and the New Orleans Pelicans, who are actually trying to win but are terrible at it. Even a team that lost back-to-back games to the Utah Jazz and Chicago Bulls won’t drop 8.5 games in the standings in their final 17 games, which at most a dozen will feature Curry.
The expected-but-disappointing injury news does make it quite unlikely the Warriors finish 7th or 8th, which likely dooms them to a first-round series with the defensing champion Oklahoma City Thunder — and that’s if everything goes right.
That’s why the Warriors may as well be patient with Curry, since their play-in fate is pretty much sealed, next week would be brutal even with him in the lineup, and his brother needs playing time anyway. We’ll know more in 10 days, but don’t be surprised if we get another 10-day notice then.
