This is some wild action happening between the circles. Minnesota's Jaden McDaniels is guarding Steph Curry nose-to-nose more than 40 feet from the basket, no space between them, two guys sharing a shirt. The other eight players on the court might as well be in another galaxy; this dance in the exurbs is its own game. The player who has the ball is somewhere behind McDaniels, far outside his sphere of interest. His mandate appears settled: He will go where Curry goes, and he will turn his attention to the ball if, and only if, he sees it in Curry's hands.
Curry is doing what he does when this happens. He's chopping his steps and raising his arms as if he's fighting through rough surf, trying to pry himself free. He swims his left arm, the one closest to McDaniels, and runs him into a Draymond Green screen. And there it is: a free patch of hardwood, a moment's peace, a place of his own. He takes a pass and sends it toward the basket, not so much a shot as a redirection, and tosses it in from about 28 feet, the ball settling in the net as if squeezed from a dropper.
This season, it feels as if each Curry basket is a victory over nature. He has always been the focus of everything around him, but never before as he is now, on a flawed Warriors team that is contending with a paradox: determined to use him less than ever at a time when it needs him the most.
"I want to do this for as long as I can," Curry says. "But the clock's ticking. We all know that."
One after another they come at him: McDaniels, Dillon Brooks in Houston, and a young guy in Memphis named Jaylen Wells, who crouched next to Curry before the opening tip six days before Christmas, the top of his head even with Curry's armpits, and followed him around just like that for the rest of the game. Curry has seen just about everything, but the look on his face indicated this Wells kid -- 6 inches taller, 21 pounds heavier and 15 years younger -- might have stumbled onto something new. No defender, judging by Curry's expression, had looked at him as if he were food.
Curry is 16 seasons into this and 36 years on Earth, and they're still there, one generation seeping into the next, making him fight for every inch. Nobody else, not Luka or Kyrie or Tatum or LeBron, puts up with this much aggravation. There's pressure from baseline to baseline, that's a given, with double-teams routinely starting at half court, from a bunch of guys either trying to make their name or keep it. "It's fatiguing, but I love it," Curry says. "It's the game within the game, and you have to find some lightheartedness in it to deal with the pressure." There are times when he'll see the second half of that double-team -- always taller, always heavier, always younger -- storming toward him at half court and laugh to himself. Are we really doing this tonight?
His movement is constant, and they track every twitch and quiver, knowing the dangers of hesitation and indecision. Lose sight of him for a second and risk humiliation. He might start one way and suddenly head the other, his body foreshadowing nothing, his dribbling quick and effortless enough to make the ball an afterthought. Or he might stand just past the three-point line with the ball and pump-fake -- the most infinitesimal movement, the effort involved in its execution masking the effort involved to create it -- at precisely the moment you jump forward, convinced this is the one time he will not pump-fake but will instead shoot the ball directly into your outstretched hand. Or he's going to stand in that same spot while you hold your ground, determined not to fall for it again, only to watch him forgo the pump-fake and flick the ball into the air and through the faraway hoop as if he can read your mind.
"He doesn't need much space," Warriors guard Gary Payton II says. "All he needs is a fingernail."
The theme of the Warriors' season is the team doing whatever it can to maximize whatever Wardell Stephen Curry II has left. But what's left of Curry is often obscured by what is left around him. There is no other scorer to fear, no Klay Thompson or Kevin Durant or even the Jordan Poole of the 2022 championship run. He is, in the view of the rest of the NBA, alone. A solo act. Curry does it, or it doesn't get done.
And when the soloist has a bad night, the show can't be saved.
Curry is sitting in a folding metal chair outside the Warriors' locker room at Chase Center during a practice day about a week before Christmas. He has just finished a marathon body-work session he calls "the full car wash." It is a concession to age and an effort to forestall it: weight work, court work, soft-tissue massage, cold bath, hot bath, more than three hours in all. He runs off the list with a slight hint of embarrassment, as if this level of pampering is someone else's idea. He doesn't get these days as often as he'd like, but he says, "At this point, you need one of these days every once in a while."
It's another dot on the evolutionary timeline. After he felt like he got thrown around in the 2016 Finals against the Cavaliers, he dedicated himself to the weight room, transforming himself from a young player who couldn't fill a tank top to a veteran who could moonlight as a bouncer. Now, he's looking ahead for a few down days on the schedule so he can have what might be described as an active spa day.
This is Curry's new phase. When I ask if the season is 82 one-act plays or one long novel consisting of 82 chapters, he says, "Oh, man -- I love that. I feel like now it's 82 one-act plays where it used to be the other. You have to give so much attention to preparing yourself for every individual game." Each game forges its own identity; no longer does one bleed into the next.
Two days earlier, the Warriors lost to the Mavericks, and two days later, Curry will be held without a field goal -- the first time in his career when he plays at least 12 minutes -- by the crouching Wells in a blowout loss to Memphis. It's the middle of a confounding stretch in which the Warriors will lose 14 of 20 games in every conceivable way, vaporizing the optimism generated by a 12-3 start. Their season feels similar to a hangover that hits before the first drink.
Curry sits in the folding chair for close to 45 minutes, barely moving, thoroughly digesting each question before giving a considered answer. The questions he likes the least -- pretty much every one that can be perceived as putting him above the team -- cause him to scrunch his mouth in a way that causes one of his eyes to nearly close. Eventually, the conversation veers to athletic mortality. He is acutely self-aware, especially for someone of his rank and privilege, and he says, "It's tough at times. It's scary at times. I know there are a lot less days ahead than there were before."
All those long postseason runs, the four NBA titles and six conference championships, the constant battles with the younger, taller, heavier defenders, he admits it has extracted a toll. "The scales have tipped, for sure," he says. "It's more of a measured approach now. I feel like I can still get to the same peaks, but is that an every-single-night-type thing? Maybe not, but it's picking and choosing your spots and trying to manage an 82-game schedule and hopefully get to a playoff series where you're fresh."
It has led to this: The Warriors play games in December and January with an eye on April, May, and June, with coach Steve Kerr adamantly refusing to extend Curry's minutes to win non-vital games. (If Curry remains at his current pace -- 31.1 minutes per game -- it will be the least he has played in a full regular season.) It's a tricky game to play, and not without its dangers: The Western Conference is so tightly packed and evenly matched that a bad week can send a team from the No. 5 seed to out of the playoffs. Four or five fewer minutes each game without Curry can easily be the difference between a playoff spot and a play-in spot, or a play-in spot and no spot at all.
"I've been doing this for years," Kerr says. "I took a lot of heat during the pandemic season because I was sticking to my guns and playing Steph 34 minutes a game, giving him about an eight-minute break in each half. And I used a line that became infamous around here when I said, 'We're not chasing wins.' And people were like, 'Then what the hell are you doing?' and the answer was, 'We're saving Steph. We're preserving him for his career.' I probably shouldn't have said the quiet part out loud, but I'm fine with admitting a big part of my job is not running Steph into the ground."
But what if, in the end, there's not enough Steph to go around? At what point does chasing wins become the only way? There is no scorer consistent enough or reliable enough to convince teams to ease off Curry, and the acquisition of Dennis Schroder has yet to change that. When the Warriors are good, when Curry is conducting the team similar to an orchestra -- knowing the individual sounds of each teammate, and calling on each accordingly -- there's nothing more melodic in sports. But when they're bad, when they're leaving their feet with no discernible plan, when they're throwing outlet passes into the third row, when they're committing the reverse miracle of turning one turnover into four, it's nothing more than a protracted screech.
Case in point: At the beginning of the Warriors' stretch of losing, they lost to a depleted Brooklyn Nets team at home. It was the kind of game the Curry-era Warriors win almost reflexively, and it had that look when they led by 18 before an eight-minute stretch in the third and fourth quarters went so bad it looked almost intentional. The answer to all of the Warriors' bad shooting and ridiculous passing and jumpy pace sat calmly on the bench, three seats to the left of Kerr, who assiduously avoided even the thought of summoning him.
"I'm not going to do it," Kerr says. "For me, it's more like this: We want to put ourselves in position to give him a chance in the playoffs. We did that when we won the title in '22; we caught lightning in a bottle and the matchups worked our way and Steph does what Steph does. We want to give him that chance again. We want that at-bat."
Kerr's methods are not punitive, nor are they selfish. If he were selfish, he would go full Tom Thibodeau and run Curry and Green out there for 40 minutes a game. The soft limit on Curry's minutes comes from collaboration. "Every day," Kerr says. "We discuss it every day." And Curry says, "That's his job. He saves me from myself a lot. There are times when I'll push the envelope, and those conversations go one of two ways: either it's no conversation at all because of his feelings about where we are that night, or there are times when I can sense an opening. When I hear, 'Tell me how you feel,' I think we can be a little aggressive here. It's kind of unspoken. It is frustrating at times when you feel you can play more, but that's why we've been successful. We all feel like we're Superman every time we go out there."
The Warriors have remained relevant for nearly every one of Curry's 16 seasons. Now, however, every game is a referendum on the impermanence of the future. A world with Curry remains fixable. A world with Curry retains possibilities.
"It's a little scary to think about what comes after this," Warriors GM Mike Dunleavy, Jr says. "Our philosophy comes from understanding we have a generational player who is still at or near the peak of his powers. And given his time horizon, it's different than if he was 25. If he was 25, there would always be a next year, but now you have to approach it like there may not be a next year."
The philosophy is sound in principle, but if this is the final stage of Curry's remarkable career, have the Warriors done enough to craft a roster good enough to allow him to give them a chance? "This team has the potential to be a championship team, but we're not there yet," Kerr says. "We're competitive every night, and we feel confident in our ability to be competitive every night. Now, whether we can do that for four rounds in the playoffs remains to be seen." The occasional dissonance on the court is a result of the franchise's attempt to infuse the team with youth while maintaining the core group of Curry, Green, Thompson and Kevon Looney, thinking they could create a seamless transition from the Curry Era to whatever comes next. The "two timelines" concept, which ran aground when the Warriors selected James Wiseman with the No. 2 pick in the 2020 draft, created a reluctance to trade young talent for established stars. The idea was to rebuild on the fly, or rebuild without the pain of rebuilding.
"I think the postmortem on some of the two-timeline stuff is not great," Curry says. "We picked Wiseman, who's had a rough go. It's not his fault, but we had an opportunity when we were at the bottom of the standings and had the No. 2 pick, and picked Wise. We thought there was going to be a way to bridge that gap, and it didn't work out that way. But to hear the way people talk about the 2022 championship is still fascinating to me. Because the 'surprise championship'" -- here his hands provide the sarcastic air quotes -- "was a crowning achievement based on that team we had and what we'd been through since the '19 Finals.
"So, 'Did they do enough?' That's not for me to answer, but this is a collaboration, and I just want to win, and they know that. Until it's all said and done, we want to have at least one more (title) to speak for. And that's it. That's what's left for me. That's all of it. I still love to hoop, but I love to win even more. So if we don't get it done, maybe when it's all said and done, I'll be able to answer that question better. Right now, we're still trying to figure it out."
The tenets of normative decision theory -- the concept of maximizing expected value -- mean the Warriors should go all out to make the most of a generational player. That might mean trading only for Schroder -- who knows? -- but more likely it means making a run at someone with more heft, the second scorer who isn't on the roster, the Booker to Durant, the Kyrie to Luka, the Lillard to Giannis, the Young Klay to Curry.
The clock ticks. The work continues. He is a young man, his boyish, unlined face known throughout the world, his fortune building every day. He has television shows and commercials, his own shoe brand and a bourbon. ("Nice little heat to it," he says as if reading from the distiller's notes. "Not too overpowering, some flavorful notes, some caramel.") The talk of an end, of any end, is difficult to compute. He is old in just one place: here.
"It's a very weird thing," he says. "I go to my kids' schools, and my wife (Ayesha) and I are the youngest in the parent group. And then you come here and you got young dudes calling you 'Yes, sir' now. It's very strange. I haven't really settled that yet."
Imagine for a moment being the best in the world at something. Not arguably the best -- that infernal phrase -- or one of the best, but objectively the best in the world. Imagine, for the sake of the exercise, you are the best typist in the world: fastest, most accurate, whatever other analytics pertain to the field. (WAR: Words Above Replacement?) And imagine typing is a team game, that part of your fate is determined by the performance of less-accomplished typists. They're over there pecking slowly, misspelling words, constantly backspacing to correct mistakes, and they're bringing you down.
How hard would that be? How tempting would it be to push them out of the chair and say, "Here. I'll do it"?
This is Steph Curry and shooting a basketball. He is the best shooter in the world, by every available statistical measurement. He has made the most 3-pointers, a resounding 24.2% more than second-place James Harden. He has led the league in 3s a record eight times and has the highest free throw percentage (91) in NBA history. He is among the game's most inventive finishers around the basket, and he possesses a remarkable ability to alter his shot when the situation necessitates. In the final seconds of the Christmas Day loss to the Lakers, he hit a 3 from deep in the right corner with LeBron James closing fast, and he did it by somehow altering his release in midair, shooting from his right ear instead of his chin.
"The things he does on the court are ridiculous," Warriors forward Trayce Jackson-Davis says. "Stuff nobody ever thought of before. It's his gravity, man. It's insane."
There are years of hard work involved in getting there, and years involved in staying there, but still: How can he do what he does and not wonder how more people can't do it? Does he ever want to push the bad typists out of their seats (metaphorically, of course) and assume control of the keyboard?
He laughs and looks over my head and toward the Chase Center court, forming the most diplomatic answer in his mind before he allows the words to enter the world. "There are times," he says, a little ruefully. "There are times you see people with unorthodox form or guys who haven't gotten better at shooting the ball year after year. So, yeah, you ask yourself those questions. Most of the time you have to understand how to work and what to work on. You take that for granted at this level. But sometimes, yeah, sometimes you want to help, to offer some wisdom or whatnot."
He doesn't, though, unless asked. To do otherwise would be presumptuous and possibly arrogant, so Curry is fine with asking himself those questions and leaving it there.
"He probably looks at the rest of us and wonders, 'Why am I the oddball?'" Payton says. "But it's a good odd. A very good odd."
You would not watch Curry play for the first time and call him humble. He is a flagrant but joyous showboater, and watching him perform live in front of his home fans -- first in Oakland, now in San Francisco -- is to experience thousands of people watching him with a pilgrim's awe. The place seems to expand and contract similar to a massive lung with each of his makes and misses.
There are impromptu moves and recurring classics. He made a ridiculous shot against the Nets, got fouled and knocked to the floor, and lay there for a good five seconds doing straight-leg crunches or some secret-menu Pilates move while shooting his index fingers in front of his chest. Particularly important shots initiate the shoulder shimmy, which traditionally takes place with his mouthpiece curving out of his mouth similar to a fishhook. His signature, of course, has become the "night night" move, for game-clinching shots, when he tucks his hands under his tilted head, mimicking peaceful slumber. On its face, it's a wildly disrespectful gesture that somehow offends nobody.
That's the magic of Curry. His excellence feels allowable, his celebrations earned.
"This combination of humility and cockiness at the same time? Players love that," Kerr says. "How many guys can get away with doing the night night and the shimmy? And the opponents never do anything about it because they respect him so much. After the game, he's the most compassionate guy. He takes accountability. He's so poised. He just handles himself beautifully. He's a family man, he's an incredible humanitarian. The number of lives he's impacted, and it's all genuine. Everyone can tell the authenticity. And because of that combination, everyone sees him and loves him" -- here Kerr stops and laughs, throwing up his hands at the audaciousness of all this glorification -- "and all I know is this: I don't know a single person who can say a bad thing about Steph."
In a recent postgame news conference, Green shared a story about an NBA All-Star who wanted to connect with Curry during the offseason. Once he secured Curry's number, the unnamed All-Star told Green he wanted to ask Curry a question, and he wondered how he should do it. Green told him, "What do you mean? Just ask him the question." This odd interaction, Green said, is just one indication of how "guys in the league look at Steph as this mythical superhero."
Opponents hated Michael Jordan; his excellence was seen as borderline sadistic. LeBron's is more punishing and incessant and less relatable, even at 40. Curry is treated with a reverence that is rare among competitors and teammates. He can bark at the referees ("It exhausts me," he says. "One-thousand percent more than any defense. You get distracted and waste energy yelling at the refs.") and he occasionally loses it completely. ("I've thrown a mouthpiece or two ... or three ... or four.") And yet nobody seems to begrudge him anything.
"The level of adulation is very uncomfortable, honestly, and surreal at the same time," Curry says. "I was never the dude who was, 'I want to be the best player.' Not that I didn't want that, but to think you could be the best player in the world or have a skill set that is recognized as the best in the world, it never felt real. I love to win, so the competitiveness was always there, and the showmanship and entertainment value of what I bring out there -- having fun. I get all that. I'm 6-3 -- average human measurements -- and out on the court, I'm very approachable and coachable. When you mix that with the levels I've been able to reach, it's very surreal. I don't think I'll be able to appreciate it until I'm done playing."
He plays with such freedom, ebullience and unflappability that it might come as a surprise, as it did to me, to learn that Curry suffers from performance anxiety, that he approaches every game with an unsettled fear of what lies ahead. He does not appear to be suffering from any existential angst as he's scoring 17 points in the fourth quarter against the Lakers on Christmas Day; he looked equally unaffected hitting eight 3s against France in the Olympic gold medal game; same for the countless times he has tossed his conscience aside and led his team by making shots from previously unimagined distances.
"Oh, for sure I have anxiety," he says. "A lot of it is baked into the expectations I've set and the level I want to play at. It's your own expectations and awareness of what a good game is. It's a healthy insecurity of having to prove yourself every single night, which is cool. It keeps you going."
Asked to explain Curry's popularity, Payton thinks for a few seconds and then raises an index finger to indicate he has come up with something he likes. "Your favorite athlete's favorite athlete is Wardell," he says. "Doesn't matter what sport, everyone is infatuated with Wardell Curry."
Midway through the third quarter against Minnesota, Curry drives under the basket and hooks a left-handed pass to Jonathan Kuminga, who catches the ball on the right wing, about 20 feet from the basket. As Curry releases the pass, McDaniels relaxes ever so briefly, just long enough for Curry to sprint along the baseline and position himself for a corner 3.
This has been the Warriors' offense for more than a decade: the ball moving, Curry zipping everywhere at once, the defense chasing but never catching. Eventually, that fingernail of space is created, and Curry can catch a return pass and loft another 3 through the net. But this time, as has been the case more often than not this season, the ball never finds its way back. Kuminga takes a long 2-pointer, and makes it, and Curry is left in the corner, his hands waist-high, ready for a pass that never comes. On its face, a successful possession; for those indoctrinated in the Warrior Way, though, the sight of Curry left open but empty-handed is a lost opportunity.
As Kerr says, they're not there yet. The burden is there, the burden his teammates put on themselves to make the most of what Curry has left, and the way the burden shifts to him as he tries to justify their loyalty. "I count it as a blessing," Curry says. "I've been playing for 16 years, and to have an expectation that your best self can be championship-worthy? I believe it. I appreciate it."
They'll keep coming at him, taller and younger and heavier, sometimes one, sometimes two. When will the body's ability to enact what the brain is seeing cease to keep up? When will the balance tip all the way over?
"I don't like wasting the rest of his time," Payton says. "I'm sure he can go for another five [years], but I don't know if he wants to do it. I treat every game like, 'Let's do this for 30.' Every game we give away is one he won't get back."
They carry each other's worlds around with them, gathering forces for his last stand. None of them, not even Curry, can account for the unknowable: Will there be enough of him left when they get there?
