Golden State spent the entire summer selling the basketball world on one last maximizing push for Stephen Curry, and it took exactly four days of actual basketball for the oldest roster in the NBA to wave the white flag on a Saturday night in Phoenix. Falling to 0-3 for the first time in Curry’s entire career is an indictment of a front office that confused nostalgia with roster construction. Even the cursed 2019-20 team that lost Kevin Durant to free agency and watched Klay Thompson tear his ACL managed to win its third game before Curry broke his hand. This 2026-27 version couldn’t even make it out of week one without trotting out a summer-league starting five of Yaxel Lendeborg, Brandon Williams, Graham Ike, Will Richard, and Gui Santos while Devin Booker dropped a franchise home-opener record 43 points on their heads.
Steve Kerr stood in front of the microphones after Saturday’s 131-122 loss to the Suns and tried to spin a nine-point defeat with a 2K auto-generated starting lineup like it was a moral victory at a youth camp. “We’re not going to lose our spirit. We’ve got a great group of guys, and some really good vets leading them. And you saw some of the youthful energy and talent we have. It’s exciting; it’s really fun watching some of these young guys play,” Kerr said after the game. I have plenty of respect for four championship banners, yet hearing a head coach on a fresh two-year deal talk up how enjoyable the young guys are to watch while his franchise icon sits out with right knee injury management makes my skin crawl.
Blowing a 12-Point Lead at Home Exposed the Real Roster Rot
Kerr and the optimists in the Golden State camp argue that Friday night’s 111-108 home collapse against Memphis was a freak statistical anomaly rather than a structural failure. “Eight different things had to happen. If any one of those eight doesn’t happen, I think we win. It was just an avalanche,” Kerr told reporters, per theScore citing ESPN’s Anthony Slater. Blaming bad luck ignores the schematic reality of why the Warriors surrendered a 17-0 run over the final 3:47 after De’Anthony Melton’s three-pointer put them up 106-94.
When a defense traps a 38-year-old Curry at the nail and forces the ball out of his hands in crunch time, this roster has zero healthy secondary rim pressure to punish a rotating shell. Golden State bricked its final eight or nine field goals against the Grizzlies while Curry finished 5-of-15 from the floor and 3-of-10 from deep, watching Cam Boozer bully his way to 25 points, 13 rebounds, and the game-winning floater with roughly 20 seconds left. My issue with Kerr’s “avalanche” excuse is that avalanches happen when you build your house on unstable snow… and banking your half-court offense on Jimmy Butler returning midseason from a torn ACL and Kristaps Porzingis overcoming POTS symptoms left Curry completely stranded on an island in game two.
Curry knew right away how damaging that Friday night choke job was, even before he sat out Saturday’s back-to-back leg alongside Draymond Green (bilateral low back soreness), Brandin Podziemski (back injury management), and Al Horford (back). “Everybody says there’s another game tomorrow. But the idea of how important every game is for us … and the fact that we gave one away like this, you might lose a little sleep over it,” Curry said after the Memphis loss, via Hoops Wire. Those are the words of a generational killer who understands Western Conference math while his coaching staff hands out participation trophies.
Scheduled Rest on Game Three Is Salary Cap Malpractice
Look at the defensive tape from the first three games and you can see a roster getting cooked at the point of attack and inside the paint. On opening night in Los Angeles, the Lakers blew the doors off Golden State 127-105 as Luka Doncic hung 28 points and Walker Kessler went a perfect 12-for-12 from the floor for 26 points against a nonexistent interior rotation. By Saturday in Phoenix, without Green Quarterbacking the back line or Podziemski and Moses Moody available on the perimeter, the Suns shot 58.1 percent from the field (50-of-86) and carved up Golden State’s drop and switch coverages for 33 assists while Booker hit 17 of his 25 shots.
Rookie Yaxel Lendeborg catching fire for 26 points on 6-of-11 three-point shooting and Melton adding 25 in Phoenix gave the timeline a cute silver lining, and Kerr leaned right into the developmental talk afterward. “We’re going to take strides with games like tonight. We’ll have a film session tomorrow or Monday, and we’ll grow from this, learn from it,” Kerr said, via Joseph Dycus on Yahoo and Heavy. I look at a team sitting 24th in the league with a minus-11.4 net rating, giving up 123.0 points per game while shooting 33.6 percent from three overall, and I see a geriatric Play-In sequel already in motion.
Golden State flies into altitude on Monday, October 26 to face the Denver Nuggets with zero wins, a broken defensive shell, and the NBA’s oldest legs already in load-management triage before Halloween. Another double-digit beatdown in Denver on Monday night will prove that Kerr’s two-year extension is just an expensive front-row ticket to watch the greatest shooter alive waste his final prime seasons carrying a hospital ward.
