Stephen Curry is right to be furious, and the anger belongs upstairs. Golden State led Memphis by 12 with under four minutes left on Friday at Chase Center, then got outscored 17-0 down the stretch and lost 111-108. Cameron Boozer dropped the go-ahead jumper with 20 seconds to go and walked out with 25 points and 13 rebounds. That dropped the Warriors to 0-2 after a 127-105 beating from the Lakers in the opener.
Curry said it himself afterward: "There's losses and there's ways that you lose tonight that kind of sting a little bit more." And: "Pretty much everything went wrong." He's not wrong. The Warriors missed their final nine shots from the field. By ESPN Research's count, that late Grizzlies surge was the second-longest fourth-quarter run an opponent has put on Kerr's teams, behind only a 21-0 Rockets run back in 2018, the kind of collapse you don't shrug off.
He chose to stay, chose the loyalty, instead of chasing a cleaner setup somewhere else. That choice doesn't make the anger wrong. The organization that cashed in his loyalty is the mistake.
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RatingLook at what he's working with. Jimmy Butler is out with a knee injury the team hopes to get back early in 2027, with no guarantee. Moses Moody is out after knee surgery, targeting a return somewhere around December or January. Kristaps Porzingis is sidelined indefinitely. That's an entire support structure in street clothes at once, around a 38-year-old who went 11-for-11 from the free throw line and poured in 24 points in a game his team still found a way to lose.
This is a roster that needed everything to break right just to be dangerous, and nothing is breaking right. The headline investment of the offseason, rookie Yaxel Lendeborg, actually gave them a real night: 18 points, 13 rebounds, six assists in his home debut. He's the oldest rookie in the league at 24. Even with him and a 38-year-old legend both showing up, Golden State still couldn't protect a double-digit lead. Steve Kerr said the effort was there, that "we didn't deserve to win the game because we didn't make the plays that we needed to at the end." The plays weren't there because the talent to make them isn't there in enough places.
RTGCall it a competitor being a competitor if you want, the kind of mood any elite player falls into after a rough night. Sure, he had a bad finish. He fouled Jaylen Wells on a made three to crack the door open, got a late three blocked by Zach Edey, and missed another from deep down the stretch. He knows that. The demeanor is about something bigger, though: the dawning reality that his prime is being spent carrying a team that can't carry him back.
And the salary line is the laziest one of all. Curry is making about $62.6 million this season, the first player to clear the $60 million mark, and somehow that's supposed to buy a vow of silence through a lost October. His pay is not the reason the bench can't close. If anything, that salary is a measure of how much the franchise owes him back, and right now what it's getting him in return is an 0-2 start with half his insurance policies hurt.
Two games in, Golden State sits near the bottom of the Western Conference. That will move, and anyone treating a two-game record in October as destiny is kidding themselves. But the shape of the problem is real: a thin, injury-exposed roster built around a four-time champion who won them titles and then stayed when he didn't have to.
He did his part. He always does. The people who left him this little to work with are the ones who should be squirming.
