Welcome to another edition of NBA Tuesday where we’re getting a little Golden State Warriors heavy lately … we know. But it is our hometown team, so we can be forgiven, perhaps. We’re chiming today to look at the team’s mismanagement of minutes for star Stephen Curry, who is in his age-36 season now—but in reality is closer to age 40 physically, thanks to so many postseason games and a myriad of leg injuries over time.

Curry actually turned 37 about a month ago, and there is no doubt Curry is still a superlative talent, as evidenced by his play in the Olympics last summer. He also continues to play at a high level for the Warriors this season, as he leads the league in three-point shots attempted and made—not to mention free-throw percentage. He is also the all-time leader in those three statistical categories, as well. We know who he is.

Yet even at this age, playing 32.2 minutes per game, Curry is hitting almost 40 percent of his three-point attempts while averaging 24.5 points per game on a team that desperately needs him to have a good game—every game. On Sunday, against the Houston Rockets, Curry played terribly, and it cost the Warriors a winnable game at home. He was just 1-for-10 from the floor, scored just three points, and had four turnovers.

Curry still played well enough to notch eight assists, but his game looked a lot like that of Caitlin Clark, and Golden State lost by ten points. The Warriors can still win out and secure a Top 6 seed in the Western Conference, but this was a winnable game for them—if Curry had played better. We realize he cannot be “Superman” every night, but the Golden State roster cannot win if he has an off night. That’s just facts.

Look at the handful of games leading up to the Houston loss: in five straight wins, Curry averaged 32:32 minutes per hame, which is right in line with his season average. However, in three of those five wins, he played at least 34 minutes or so, and those all came on the road. Curry is old, and his minutes should have been managed a lot better over the course of the last few seasons. But the Warriors couldn’t afford to do it.

He scored 161 points in those five wins, including a whopping 125 points in the last three victories—while playing a combined 103 minutes in that trio of wins, all against playoff-bound teams. Considering the last two games in the sequence were on back-to-back nights that included travel from Los Angeles back to the Bay Area? No wonder Curry had nothing in the tank against the Rockets, no matter who was guarding him.

The roster talent around him has been so ineffective and inefficient since the miraculous run to the NBA title in 2022 that Head Coach Steve Kerr has had to play him too much, really. And it may cost them again this season, depending on how the last week shakes out and how the playoffs go down. Golden State has four games left, and the team needs to get at least 49-50 wins to make sure of a real playoff seeding.

Does Curry have it left in his legs? He has gotten rest this year, playing in just 66 games out of the 78 completed so far. His minutes are “down” in the sense that this is least amount of playing time per game in a full season during his entire career. Yet perhaps it still has been too much since the Warriors just haven’t had the ability to win without him on the court. His 6.3 BPM mark is tops on the team by quite a lot, really.

The next-best, regular-rotation player on the team—Gary Payton II—checks in at just 1.4 BPM. Jimmy Butler has put up 5.0 BPM since joining the team, which really helps, but he came to the team a bit too late perhaps to really help preserve Curry for the postseason. One of the reasons we saw Curry shine in Paris? Deep rotational play, but of course, the U.S. National Team is an All-Star roster, so that can work quite well.

Golden State cannot pull that off in the same way, obviously. Curry was always elite, making average players around him look better: Klay Thompson, primarily. We know Draymond Green and his limitations; they are many. Other than Kevin Durant for three seasons, the Warriors never were able to pair Curry with a worthy peer; that’s not anyone’s fault. It’s hard to put together all-time greats on one team.

But let us never forget that Curry was Michael Jordan here: like Jordan, he has been a transcendent player, and no one on his team, save Durant, has ever been worthy of Curry’s greatness. Jordan never had a Durant, as much as people like to pretend Scottie Pippen was great. We all saw what happened when Jordan retired, as Pippen crumbled under the pressure of leadership and expectations. Curry is hanging on, but …

We’re going to assume the Warriors don’t win an NBA title this spring. Butler is signed for two more seasons, and Curry is under contract through 2027 as well. Golden State has to do something else this offseason to give the team a chance at a fifth NBA championship for Curry, and whatever that is, the solution is going to have to include limiting Curry’s minutes to under 30:00 per game going forward.