Sixteen 40-point games after turning 35 is an indictment of every basketball executive who tried to write Stephen Curry’s obituary two weeks ago. While the rest of the league spent late October measuring Golden State for a coffin after the first 0-3 start of Curry’s 18-year career, the 38-year-old guard walked onto the Chase Center floor on Saturday night and dropped 41 points to bury the Orlando Magic 126-119 in overtime. That victory marks seven straight wins for a 7-3 Warriors roster that became only the second team in NBA history, alongside the 1950-51 Boston Celtics, to follow an 0-3 start with a seven-game winning streak.
Let us examine the evidence from Saturday night’s box score before anybody dares to call this a fluke. Curry shot 13-of-19 from the field, hit 5-of-10 from three-point range, went 10-for-10 at the line, and added six rebounds and six assists across roughly 36 minutes. By crossing the 40-point threshold for the 16th time since his 35th birthday, he officially broke LeBron James’s NBA record of 15 and left Michael Jordan’s 12 in the rearview mirror. When my kids ask why we never change the channel on a tight fourth quarter in San Francisco, this is the exact syllabus.
“We don’t forget where people thought we were at the beginning of the year,” Curry said after the game.
He remembers the noise because the league’s trade-machine vultures were circling San Francisco all summer after Golden State got bounced in last season’s playoffs. With Jimmy Butler likely sidelined until January, Moses Moody weeks away from returning, and no clarity on when Kristaps Porzingis will play basketball again, plenty of people around the league questioned whether committing to an aging roster without its injured supporting cast was wise. Look at what Orlando did on Saturday to test that exact premise: the Magic pulled down 24 offensive rebounds, won the total glass 57-42, and outscored the Warriors 26-10 off 18 Golden State turnovers while erasing a 57-41 halftime deficit with a 37-20 third-quarter blitz. Yet Golden State still survived because Curry’s gravity opened things up for Draymond Green, who dished out a season-high 13 assists, while the team shot 53.8 percent and went 15-of-32 from deep.
The Sixteen-Time Standard of Senior Dominance
Look closely at how Curry dismantled Orlando when the game hung in the balance. After Jamal Cain’s putback tied regulation with roughly two seconds left and Tristan da Silva hit a three-pointer in overtime to give the short-handed Magic a 118-117 lead with 2:24 remaining, Curry took complete command of the paint. With 1:38 left in the extra session, he knifed into the lane to convert a go-ahead floater through a foul for a three-point play, part of a stretch where he poured in 19 points across the fourth quarter and overtime. Even on a night when Franz Wagner hung 30 points and 11 assists, Orlando had no defensive schematic answer for a 38-year-old guard who has now made 66 of his 67 free throws through eight games while averaging 31.3 points per night.
“It makes me super proud of the work that’s gone in, especially with some injuries and all that,” Curry told ESPN’s Anthony Slater after tying Oscar Robertson for eighth all-time with his 77th career 40-point performance. “But just the idea I could still get to a certain level you kind of feed off of that. Especially when it’s in a winning fashion like tonight, where we needed all of them. I appreciate the longevity.”
Longevity at this efficiency is an assault on the historical hierarchy of perimeter basketball. On the same night Curry became only the seventh player in NBA history to accumulate 26,000 career points, 5,000 rebounds, and 6,000 assists, my respect for his conditioning hit another tier entirely. Curry looked like a man prosecuting a personal vendetta against the calendar…and winning every single possession.
Yaxel Lendeborg Changes the Roster Math
Nobody in the rebuild camp accounted for Yaxel Lendeborg turning into a legitimate two-way force ten games into his rookie season. While Curry carried the scoring load, Lendeborg logged 23 points, eight rebounds, three assists, and three blocks against Orlando, punctuated by a late overtime dunk and clutch free throws alongside Curry as the duo accounted for Golden State’s final 12 points. Brandin Podziemski chipped in 15 points of his own, proving that Golden State’s internal bridge can hold the fort in the Western Conference’s fifth-place tie without mortgaging the franchise’s soul.
“As long as I’ve got my health and this crowd and this team, I’m gonna keep giving it everything I’ve got,” Curry said after the sellout crowd of 18,064 watched him close the door.
The Western Conference now has a massive problem on its hands before the calendar even flips to winter. If Curry holds a 7-3 team together on 68.4 percent shooting nights while Lendeborg matures in real time, what happens in January when Jimmy Butler walks back through that locker room door to take the secondary ball-handling pressure off Curry’s shoulders?
