The NBA is a league rife with inevitabilities, but one has yet to be broken or disproved: Father Time is undefeated. LeBron James has fought tooth and nail to prolong his career and escape its clutches, but cracks have started to surface. Kevin Durant has continued his high level of play despite an Achilles rupture that would’ve eliminated the luster from lesser players, but lower-leg injuries of relatively minor stature have still limited Durant’s availability the past couple of seasons.
And then, there’s Stephen Curry, the 37-year-old 6’2” guard whose conditioning and ability to shoot the basketball remain unrivaled, despite battling players who once watched him on television a decade ago. Conventional wisdom holds that these players should be faster, more athletic, inundated with a seemingly bottomless well of energy, and most important of all: hungry to prove themselves. For the most part, they are all of the above. More often than not, young lions will win against the grizzled leader of the pride whose best years are well behind him.
Not only has Curry been able to stave off the new generation that has tried so hard to render him irrelevant — he’s been able to lord his greatness over most of them in the same manner that he once was able to do against the generation that preceded him. His longevity and continuing presence at the highest levels of professional basketball have resulted in a 2024-25 season of accolades rare for someone with 16 years of burn: an All-Star nod (his 11th), an All-NBA Second Team selection (his 5th; 9th overall All-NBA selection), and 9th in Most Valuable Player voting — all while finishing the season averaging 24.5 points, 4.4 rebounds, and 6.0 assists on a 53/40/93 shooting split (2P/3P/FT) and a True Shooting percentage of 61.8%. Not to mention, getting past a young Houston Rockets team in last season’s playoffs despite a contentious, rough-and-tumble series that reached Game 7.
But winning that series came at a price.
The physicality the Rockets employed against Curry may have played a significant part in him straining his hamstring in Game 1 of the Warriors’ series against the Minnesota Timberwolves. Curry was forced to sit out for a prolonged period of time, while his teammates couldn’t muster enough of a challenge to give their superstar at least one more win, enough for Curry to potentially come back and rally them. Furthermore, a hamstring strain was an entirely novel injury for Curry — and perhaps a sign of Father Time peeking through a door that has become a tad bit ajar.
Such an injury compounded one necessity that the Warriors need to recognize: Curry’s time at the very top of the basketball pyramid is an hourglass thats sands are close to being emptied. No one questions Curry’s ability to take a team to the promised land a fifth time. But no player is an island. In a league that markets its individual superstars as the driving forces behind success, basketball at its very core is still a team sport. Curry and his peers — James, Durant, etc. — all won their titles with competent supporting casts. If Curry is to win a fifth ring — joining all-time greats such as Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Magic Johnson — he needs to be surrounded by pieces that will shine a light on his ability to spearhead such an effort.
After last year’s trade deadline, the 2025 playoffs, and the early part of the 2025-26 season, Curry has seemingly found the perfect secondary star in Jimmy Butler, who profiles as an antithesis of sorts to Curry and the ethos of the team. Butler prefers deliberate play as opposed to the chaotic pace of the Warriors. Throughout his career, he has been known for his low-turnover play, a remedy for a team that has a wanton tendency to waste possessions.
But perhaps his most crucial skill for a team that desperately needed it? The ability to create shots for himself and for his teammates.
Advantage creation beyond Curry has been an adventure in the sense that there has been close to zero from the non-Curry contingent. Butler is a solution to that problem, in that he himself can warp the geometry of a defensive alignment, tilt it heavily toward his side of the floor, and allow Curry to operate freely on the second side:
Moreover, Butler fits with Curry like a perfectly shaped wooden puzzle piece. Two-man actions between the Warriors’ stars have been no-brainer concepts to lean on, such as inverted pick-and-rolls in which Curry is the screener and Butler is the ball handler.
The natural proclivity of Curry to draw multiple defenders into his gravitational orbit meshes beautifully with Butler’s propensity to get into the paint, work off of two feet, and put pressure on the rim.
The Curry-Butler duo outscored opponents by 7 points per 100 possessions in 496 non-garbage-time minutes last season, which is expected of stars who complement each other. But the more telling on/off metric has been the Warriors’ minutes last season (327) with Butler on the floor and Curry on the bench. In those minutes, the Warriors outscored opponents by nearly 16 points per 100 possessions, an unheard-of occurrence during non-Curry minutes that have historically been crippling for the team.
Inserting Draymond Green and turning things into a three-man dance further enhances the overall product. Butler turning the corner after a Curry screen, kicking out to Green in the corner (who is often left unguarded), and capping the possession off with a “blind corner” handoff to a sprinting Curry counts as one of the deadliest three-man actions that has ever graced a basketball court.
When a fourth veteran is added to the mix in the form of Al Horford, the possibilities expand even further. Horford’s ability to shoot the ball at the five spot (career 37.7% on threes) is coupled with his deceivingly versatile profile as a defender. But it is his screening that has arguably popped most when paired with Curry, who thrives coming off of one or several screens.
The rock-solid picks that were lost with the departure of Kevon Looney were immediately replaced with the equally capable — if not better — screening chops of the 39-year-old big man.
But the operative term above is 39-years old. Meanwhile, Curry and Green are turning 38 and 36 in March, respectively. Butler recently turned 36 this past September. This three-man core with a fourth dependable veteran has a combined odometer reading that would put a 1996 Buick Roadmaster to shame. Rarely does an aging core keep up the sustained pace necessary for the rigors of an 82-game season, let alone make a deep playoff run. Head coach Steve Kerr intends to keep minutes and playing time to a reasonable amount, as he already has with Horford, who sat the back end of the team’s most recent back-to-back slate against the Portland Trail Blazers — a 139-119 thrashing that came a night after a scintillating overtime win against the Denver Nuggets.
Kerr himself is on a timer. He has stated that he is in no rush to sign an extension that would keep him as the Warriors’ coach after this season, which is the last of his current contract. It would be difficult to imagine a world where Curry is coached by someone other than Kerr — Curry himself stated as such. It may be too far-fetched of a statement to say that without Kerr, there would be no Curry. But it is fair to say that without Kerr, the version of Curry that took an additional leap from an All-Star to a two-time MVP, and eventually into an all-time great, would probably not exist.
At the very least, without Kerr, we wouldn’t be seeing Curry run off of his patented and most iconic half-court set: the low-post split action, which continues to be effective despite years of film and data on record that is available for opponents to parse through.
An inconvenient truth about Kerr (or convenient for some, especially in Warriors’ Twitter/X circles) has been his struggles with developing young players, compounded by the Warriors’ series of unfortunate draft luck — most of which was luck of the Warriors’ own making. The James Wiseman fiasco remains a sore point for many (missing out on potential choices such as Anthony Edwards, LaMelo Ball, and Tyrese Haliburton), while Jonathan Kuminga (more on him in a bit) and Moses Moody have had development curves that haven’t aligned with the urgency Curry needs. Brandin Podziemski has received a role that has outsized his draft standing, but his ability to impact winning has waxed and waned, to the chagrin of many fans.
Jordan Poole is perhaps the most successful developmental project under Kerr’s supervision. But the relationship between him, the team, and a teammate (i.e., Green) deteriorated quickly after the 2022 championship season. His departure via trade robbed the Warriors of a dynamic shot creator who thrived next to and independent of Curry, a role they would struggle to replace before Butler’s acquisition. Poole remains one of the team’s biggest what-ifs, a question that may never be answered.
There is an argument that rather than focusing on developing young players in concert with trying to win more championships, the front office should have exchanged their draft assets for win-now pieces — whether they came in the form of dependable role players or big-fish acquisitions. Perhaps this was an opportunity sorely missed. But the Warriors are left with no choice but to work with the pieces they have if they are unwilling to pivot and part with their current corps of young players. For that to be sustainable, a collective step-up has to occur.
In Kuminga’s case, a contentious offseason between himself and the organization nearly severed a relationship that was fraught with ups and downs. It may be a relationship that will never be fully repaired. But with Kuminga’s commitment to staying for at least one more season, he has shown a willingness to buy into Kerr’s philosophy after previously struggling to fit in. But to be frank, buy-in is the bare minimum; with Kuminga, he has been showing signs that he can reach beyond what is barely needed of him.
Kuminga is anomalous in many ways to what Kerr and the Warriors want to be. But he also has one thing the Warriors don’t have an abundance of: pogo-stick athleticism. The point of contention has always been how Kuminga has made use of such a gift — more specifically, if he can use his leaping ability to crash the boards.
Fortunately for the Warriors, not only has Kuminga shown a newfound vigor for rebounding (averaging 8.2 rebounds per 75 possessions on a small sample size) — he’s been excellent at tracking down missed shots and heading toward the endpoint of their trajectory, which has given the Warriors extra possessions, situations where Curry feasts upon a discombobulated defense.
Much like Butler, Kuminga has also maximized his occasional pairings with Curry in the halfcourt, courtesy of on-ball actions such as inverted pick-and-rolls:
There has also been the off-ball screening that takes advantage of Curry’s gravity, allowing Kuminga to slip toward the rim for the finish — and thus, providing a level of rim pressure that has been glaringly sparse over the past couple of seasons:
Kuminga’s on-ball defense has never been problematic, even if it isn’t quite up to All-Defensive standards. He has been tasked with guarding the opposing team’s primary ball handler and/or most prominent perimeter scoring threat, as he did against the Los Angeles Lakers’ Luka Dončić and the Nuggets’ Jamal Murray. His off-ball awareness and instinct, on the other hand, have left much to be desired in the past.
That history is why it was a sight for sore eyes when Kuminga played a central part in a defensive stop against the Nuggets’ Nikola Jokić — rescuing Curry on a switch by stepping up, pointing Curry to switch toward Christian Braun in the corner, and switching onto Jokić just in time to force a missed shot. In “scramming” Curry out of a sticky situation, Kuminga showed poise and calm that were previously rare sights.
(It is also a development that may have been inspired by Green — famous for his ability to diagnose mismatches and “scram” teammates away from them, a hallmark of a Warriors defense that he has anchored for a decade.)
If this development turns out to be real rather than a mean-spirited glimpse of what could have been from the Basketball Gods, the Warriors now have another supplementary weapon to unleash next to Curry, for at least this season. There are plenty of rea$on$ to believe that Kuminga, again playing for his next contract in unrestricted free agency, will maintain this recent stretch of promising play, and the Warriors will be better for it.
However, the question still remains: Will it be enough to contribute to another championship run? If Kuminga is the sole member of the two-timeline movement to contribute any sort of winning impact in 2025 or 2026, will it be sufficient even if his fellow prospects in Moody, Podziemski, and Quinten Post continue to saunter along the spectrum of mediocrity?
Furthermore, the question of age and durability remains. The Warriors’ most experienced and battle-tested members are either old, injury-prone, or both. The one who is quite durable (Buddy Hield) has been consistently inconsistent, resulting in a two-guard rotation (Podziemski and Hield) that has contributed next to nothing. The return of De’Anthony Melton can’t come soon enough, even if his form after returning from an ACL injury is a huge question mark. Seth Curry’s expected return from waivers will also be welcomed.
External factors may also play an obstructive role in the Warriors’ goals. The Western Conference is a bloodbath of teams that range from the extremely elite (Oklahoma City) to the deceptively disruptive (Portland). No team save for a few in the conference can be considered easy opponents. The path to a championship in the West will be littered with a consistent stream of dangerous adversaries. Curry is no stranger to such a challenge. But with time running out, a supporting cast that has plenty of answers but even more questions left to address, and a league that is only increasing in the number of hungry lions waiting to take his place, can Curry continue to bare his fangs and maintain his place atop the hill?
If Curry has anything to say about it, the answer is a resounding “yes.” He has started the season on a tear: 33.3 points, 4.3 rebounds, and 4.7 assists while shooting 61.5% on twos, 45.7% on nearly 12 threes attempted per game, a perfect 20-of-20 clip from the free throw line, and a scorching 71.6% True Shooting mark. But despite such numbers that belie the ticking biological clock — and perhaps for the first time in a long while — it isn’t completely up to him. Not having that degree of control and shifting a bulk of it to external factors raises the likelihood of a stumbling block along the way. In a conference and league that punishes even the slightest of mistakes, the path toward the top may be too unforgiving for Curry and the Warriors to reach it a fifth time.
