Steph Curry: “Can we rethink how we do things?”

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With Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody both on the shelf for awhile, can “organized chaos” evolve yet again to, as one Wardell Stephen Curry put it on the podium after the Warriors were eliminated, “get back to the basics of what makes a good basketball team, a competitive basketball team, every single night”?

Here’s the context: About halfway into the postgame presser, Nick Friedell of The Athletic had this exchange with Steph:

The goal obviously here has always been the title and you guys were consistent from the start of the year that, if everybody was healthy, you felt like you could take some swings and get there. As you see what happened this year, the uncertainty about the summer, do you walk into next year feeling like if you get everybody back healthy with the group that you do have, that you can still at least push for that level?

Yeah, but I think we can approach it differently in the way that we build the year because we started the year with that as an aspiration. I’ve only been in one locker room for the last 17 years. Before you win the title, there was only like those first two years, like, you’re building the foundation for what a championship team looks like, even though you had no idea what that really meant. Then you accomplish it and then everything else is based off of that. And it’s been that way for, since 2015, so I think we can reshape the narrative, like, knowing the back of our mind, like, that is the ultimate goal, but we have to get back to the basics of what makes a good basketball team a competitive basketball team every single night. Understand how, realize how hard it is to win in this league, but can we rethink how we do things with the foundation that we’ve established? We don’t have to keep saying, “Championship, championship championship,” every day, even though we’ve experienced that. It’s, can we just build a foundation again with what this team needs to do, with the way that the game is played now, how fast it is, how young and athletic it is, all of those things? We have to kind of put everything on the drawing board to get back to just being competitive every single night.

Ron Kroichick of the SF Chronicle then followed up:

Is (Steve Kerr) still the right coach for where you guys are and do you agree with it, “Every coach has an expiration date,” or can it go longer?

I think everything we’ve done is unprecedented and there’s only a few examples you can kind of look to in the history of basketball, especially in the modern era where, when we started, again, the way the game is played has changed from 2013-14 when we were kind of ascending to, or ‘14-15 when coach got here, where we were ascending to how it’s played now, roster construction, like, all those things. You have to adapt and evolve, for sure. I think Coach is fully capable of doing that and thinking outside the box as we go, but to his point, and your spirit has to be in it, your mind has to be in it. Your coaching staff, like, every dynamic has to be on that journey with you, so only he can answer that and it sounds like he’s put a lot of thought into it, but we’ll have those conversations where I get to kind of understand where his mindset is because it’s not like he was going to open up to me on that front, over the last, or at any point during the season because we still had a job to do.

As a former coach, I can say that, as thrilling and vintage a performance as we got from Curry in LA, as damaged goods as he looked in Phoenix, they did not deserve to win either game.

You cannot show up and throw the ball to the wrong team twenty times in a do-or-die situation and expect a good outcome. Of course, as Jimmy likes to say, Steph is the ultimate cheat code.

And when fully healthy, the Draymond Green two-man action is probably the most beautiful “shared brain” type of basketball I’ve ever seen:

Individually, Michael Jordan was more of a one-man wrecking crew in the illegal defense era. As far as beautiful basketball goes, “organized chaos” with Klay Thompson spread fifty feet away from Steph felt more like a full team thing.

So, gravity with Curry is definitely still must-watch TV, except that in its present form, when it doesn’t work, the turnovers become layups and kick-spray threes in the modern NBA. It only takes a minute-and-a-half for 10-0 runs to happen. That’s where the athleticism comes in.

The Clippers lacking scoring with Darius Garland in foul trouble and Draymond doing a number defending Kawhi Leonard straight up helped brew the perfect storm for them, but what might have been lost in the shuffle is the fact that the Warriors had reached twenty turnovers at around the ten-minute mark of Q4 in LA.

Mathematically, that’s 20 turnovers in 38 minutes of play. They were on pace for 25 turnovers, but they went the final ten minutes without committing a single turnover.

It’s all documented here:

But then, 45 hours later in Phoenix, the Dubs reverted back to the same bad habits and started the game averaging about one turnover per minute again, with a near-identical 13-2 deficit by the time Kerr had to burn his first timeout:

I am definitely relieved, though, that Steph himself acknowledged the need to evolve.

It does seem odd if Steve is not at the helm for this next evolution. We’ll cover this more in the next week, but I also think a lot of that really comes down to the Draft Lottery.

I would not be surprised if Joe Lacob waits until after May 10th, the date of the Lottery, to decide on Kerr’s fate.

If Golden State somehow gets lucky with the ping pong balls and lands a Top Four pick, then you must play that Top Four pick next season in heavy rotation minutes and you cannot allow another Jonathan Kuminga situation to happen.

Two roster spots occupied by $70 million worth of healing ligaments and tendons until January 2027, at the earliest, demand such.

Even the 11th pick, or 12th through 14th, should GSW be leapfrogged with an unfavorable Lottery — or whatever roster moves are to be made with that pick or another roster spot — you must start playing other pieces!

By the way, Eric Guilleminault of NBADraft.net hopped on postgame after the Phoenix loss to give us a primer for the 2026 Draft:

It is a fluid situation and the Draft Combine could move guys up or down on mock boards around that 11th pick. There will definitely be a ton more headed your way pertaining to the Draft, coming up.

So I think everyone sees the writing on the wall: the turnover issue must be solved. Even Kerr himself at one point early in the season, before Butler went down, said that the turnovers were up to Curry and Green.

Jimmy became the calming force to the organized chaos. There were four games of this where it finally gelled, then he went down.

The basketball gods have a way of regressing things back to the mean, back to how the game should be played.

Organized chaos, as it now hinges on the runner’s knee of a 38-year-old who runs around the most in the NBA, will have to become the exception, not the rule — makes you kinda appreciate prime Klay, ya know?

Steph’s full transcript behind the paywall below will be unlocked at the next post, as are the previous transcripts, or just head to the Comments on YouTube…