Stephen Curry’s strained adductor muscle – groin pull for you traditionalists – is supposed to be benign, costing him a game or two, depending on his healing skills and Warriors coach Steve Kerr’s mood.
And given that the next four games are against the Brooklyn Nets, Los Angeles Clippers, Atlanta Hawks and free-falling Houston Rockets, it could just as easily be three or four.
Most notably, though, nobody here is sweating it. Hell, they’re not even speculating about long-term ramifications, and we speculate about long-term ramifications about paper cuts.
It isn’t that we’re any better at sports medicine than other people. We have just lived through the reality too many times – it isn’t the severity of the injury, it’s the timing of the injury.
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In Curry’s case, the absence merely takes him out of the action a bit. He has been redefining the Curry Experience this year, but there is no narrative that can’t use the occasional breather. And the fact that he will be joined in civilian clothes by two others members of The Rotation, Draymond Green and Shaun Livingston, changes nothing. In Oakland, injuries are merely roster management with trainers.
It is merely one more way in which the Warriors treat the pre-postseason – as a gigantic drama suck in which players get to define themselves for the audience until the big games come along. Then, they get to redefine themselves as a team.
This brings us to the Milwaukee game Thursday night, in which the Warriors pretty much wire-to-wire overmatched by a Bucks team that assembled the ways the Warriors can be beaten – by negating the stars by crowding them out of their comfort zones, by eliminating the support staff from changing momentum and energy, and by being long of reach and dogged of purpose.
The Warriors would have lost that game if Curry had played 40 minutes. They probably would have lost if Green had played. Even when Golden State has perfect attendance, they do lose the occasional game.
And Milwaukee has that Warrior attitude of 2015, namely, “It’s our time.” It probably isn’t yet, so maybe we say it the Warrior attitude of 2014, but they are positioned as well as any team to make comparisons to dynasty launching points.
But we look for measuring sticks when there really aren’t any, and with all the generosity we can muster, there remains no team that has even a counterpuncher’s chance of beating this team four times in seven games. Curry’s injury, for as long as it lasts, at best impacts only his chance of having another 400-three-point season, and his enjoyment of life without someone manipulating the inside of his left thigh for medical reasons. And if you need that kind of elemental validation for the season he is having, you’re not nearly granular enough for the new NBA.
Put another way, for the Warriors, it isn’t just how you play or even when you play, but when you don't that matters.
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