Three weeks ago the Warriors were 0-3, their first such start since 2007-08, and the critics were writing the obituary. Sportsbooks had them at 37 wins. They’d finished 10th last season, Jimmy Butler’s knee had been torn up since January, and the franchise player was 38. The “Golden State Warriors Dynasty” movie was supposed to be over and the credits were rolling. Half the theater was already headed out to the parking lot while the people who stuck around got one last shot in the post-credits scene.
Cut to a slow zooming close-up of Steph’s shooting hand poking out of the rubble. Wait a minute, did those fingers just twitch?!
MY GOODNESS, THEY’RE NOT DONE, NOT BY A LONGSHOT. The sequel is coming whether the critics like it or not.
Saturday Curry put up 41 points to drag Golden State past Orlando 126-119 in overtime, and that made it seven straight. Every time you think you’ve figured out what’s carrying them, they show you something else.
Sometimes it’s a hungry rookie. The streak started in Denver, where Golden State walked in as seven-point underdogs and left with a 20-point blowout behind Yaxel Lendeborg’s 31 and 12. A week later they played the Clippers without Curry, Draymond Green or Butler, and Lendeborg dropped 37. That’s the most by a Warriors rookie since Curry had 42 in 2010. A streak is supposed to die on that kind of night.
Sometimes it’s the legend being legendary. Curry hung 44 on Minnesota, and Saturday he scored 19 in the fourth quarter and overtime after Orlando had climbed all the way back. Steve Kerr said they only “got out of there alive because of Steph”.
And sometimes they just refuse to stay down. Luka put the Lakers up 25, and the Warriors won by 17, becoming the first team in 30 seasons to pull that off. Two nights later they were down 17 to Phoenix before Curry’s 25 second-half points won it. In between they hawked down the Miami Heat to stun former teammates Klay Thompson and Andrew Wiggins.
There’s only one team hotter. That’d be the reigning, defending Western Conference champion Spurs who beat Portland Saturday for their eighth straight, the league’s longest active run. Nobody else in the league has more than four. The Warriors are 7-3 and in the West’s top five, a sentence that sounded like fan fiction last spring.
In Curry’s first four seasons the Warriors never got past five wins in a row. Since then, the Warriors have strung together 22 streaks of seven or more before this one, each a separate run snapped by a loss before the next began. Let’s lay them out like old Polaroids:
2013-14: 10 → first-round exit
2014-15: 16, 8, 12 → CHAMPS
2015-16: 24, 7, 11, 7, 7 → 73 wins, lost the Finals
2016-17: 12, 7, 7, 14 → CHAMPS
2017-18: 7, 11, 7 → CHAMPS
2018-19: 8, 11 → lost the Finals (cheated by NBA probably)
2021-22: 7, 7, 9 → CHAMPS
2024-25: 7 → second-round exit
2026-27: 7 and counting → we’ll see
Now I’m no slick big city streak tracker, but it looks like in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2022 all of those 7-game victory tours ended up in championship seasons. And I’m not telling you a seven-game streak in November gets you a parade... I’m just telling you that every parade we’ve thrown in this era had a few of these behind it.
Kerr kept spirits up through the 0-3 start knowing Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody were due back in the coming months. So the cavalry hasn’t even arrived yet, and this was the version of the Warriors that was only supposed to hang on until it did.
The Pelicans come to Chase Center on Monday, with eight in a row on the table and the Rockets and Spurs looming on the schedule.