SAN FRANCISCO — Golden State Warriors star Stephen Curry scored 29 points in 26 minutes Sunday night against the Houston Rockets, delivering a loud return performance from a 27-game absence that was missing only the final punctuation point.
Curry brought the Warriors back from 10 points down in the final five minutes and lined up a winning 30-footer at the buzzer, but the jumper missed long and the Warriors lost 117-116.
“Looked great when it left his hands,” Rockets forward Kevin Durant said. “I was a little nervous seeing that ball in the air.”
Curry’s night started with a sputter. He volunteered to come off the bench to help manage his minutes and subbed in to the game for his brother, Seth Curry, with 4:54 left in the first quarter, getting a standing ovation from the crowd. In his first sequence, Curry had a flailing miss and committed a travel violation.
“First run was rough,” Curry said. “Second run was great.”
Curry played the final six minutes of the second quarter and started to generate a rhythm, scoring seven points.
In the third quarter, Kerr finally stretched him out, playing Curry the final 7:58 of the quarter. Curry scored 11 points in that stint and another 11 in seven fourth-quarter minutes, finishing with 29 and bumping his minute total a nudge past the initial plan of about 24.
“I don’t think there’s a tougher defender in the league for him to have his first game against than Amen Thompson,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. “That’s quite a test. Steph looked amazing.”
Curry said postgame that he expected a similar workload Tuesday night against the Sacramento Kings but acknowledged that the NBA calendar creates urgency.
There are only four games left in the regular season, and Curry is likely to play in only three of them before the Warriors face a do-or-die elimination game the following week in the play-in tournament against either the LA Clippers or Portland Trail Blazers. They’ll have to win twice to force their way into the playoffs.
“Got to be smart and do the right thing for the right reasons,” Curry said. “All I’m looking forward to is Tuesday.”
Kerr said Curry will enter the starting lineup again at some point in the near future, but the franchise is taking a cautionary approach to an “unpredictable” knee injury that kept him out more than two months after he initially said he thought he’d miss only 7-10 days.
Curry called the “runner’s knee” — persistent pain and swelling that he must manage — his “new normal,” though he reiterated that there are no structural issues in his right knee and he doesn’t feel compromised.
The Warriors are 36-42, meaning they’ll finish below .500 for the first time since the 2019-20 season. They are a near certainty to finish as the 10th seed but believe they can morph back into a playoff threat in the coming days with Curry in the lineup and veteran center Al Horford likely to return from a calf strain by the weekend.
“You can just feel it,” Kerr said. “We’re back in the mix. We’re back in the fight with Steph. … It doesn’t take much for him to find his rhythm. His rhythm is also our rhythm. … He changes everything.”
