Stephen Curry is a warrior.
He’s also a Golden State Warrior.
Curry re-aggravated a left knee injury against the Los Angeles Lakers on Tuesday night that’s been giving him problems over the last two weeks. He missed games against the Dallas Mavericks and Houston Rockets and was limited to just 14 minutes against the Denver Nuggets. On Tuesday night, Curry logged a total of 26 minutes, but was briefly taken out during the third quarter after he made contact with Roy Hibbert on a layup and came down awkwardly on his left leg.
While he returned, Curry indicated that this recurring issue needs time to heal—time he won’t give it, per ESPN.com’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss (h/t Complex Sports):
“It’s just frustrating and annoying and any other adjective you want to throw in there,” Curry said after the Warriors beat the Lakers to improve to 33-2, the best 35-game start in NBA history. “Long-term, it’s not something that I’ll have to worry about. It’s just playing through an injury that’s there. It doesn’t get worse if I play on it, unless I get kicked, and that’s happened three times since I did it, so hopefully it won’t keep happening again.”
. . .
On when Golden State’s training staff said he would be 100 percent, Curry said, “A while, like four weeks. I’m not going to sit out four weeks, so just got to figure out how to protect it while I’m out on the floor and keep playing. We’ve done a good amount and just had a couple unlucky plays, and we’ll keep addressing it.”
That the injury doesn’t sound as if it will be compounded by Currying playing through it is huge. But knowing Curry is playing at less than 100 percent is troubling overall. He’s in the midst of the what is, quite clearly, the best offensive season in league history, and he, along with Draymond Green, is one of two players the Warriors simply cannot afford to lose.
On the flip side, you must defer to Golden State’s training staff on this one. Head coach Luke Walton admitted, per Strauss, that he only inserted Stephen Curry back into the Lakers game because the point guard was “adamant” about it, but neither he nor the medical-expert powers that be will unnecessarily risk the well-being of the Warriors’ best player.
So, there’s that.
