Steph Curry update: Warriors guard felt sick during warmups in Charlotte, Kerr says
On one of the most bizarre game nights in Charlotte Hornets history, Steph Curry started the game with a walk-off and Terry Rozier ended it with another one.
Curry didn’t play a single second Saturday night. He doesn’t have COVID-19, according to the Golden State Warriors. But the sharpshooter from Charlotte felt poorly just before game time and left the court, never to return.
“Going through his usual warmup routine, he did not feel well at all,” said Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who didn’t rule out Curry for Golden State’s next game Tuesday. “There were no (COVID-related) protocols in place. He was just feeling sick.”
While Curry’s departure will understandably be the national headline about this game, two hours later came some more serious dramatics.
Rozier’s contested 20-footer from the left baseline at the buzzer beat Golden State, 102-100 — a game-winner made possible by the Warriors’ Draymond Green self-destructing and drawing two technicals with the Warriors up by two points with 9.3 seconds to go.
Green was ejected for the double technicals, which came when he disputed that Gordon Hayward had recovered a loose ball and called timeout. The Warriors thought it should have been called as a jump ball — Green was tussling with Hayward on the floor for the ball — but Green’s angry explosion cost them the game.
“Draymond can’t do that,” said Kerr, although the coach also said Golden State should have been awarded a jump ball as Charlotte had been in a similar situation a few seconds earlier. “He knows that. He made a terrible mistake. ... He crossed the line.”
Rozier hit the two technical foul shots to tie the game and then ended it with his off-balance jumper to finish with 36 points and on the bottom of a happy mob of teammates.
Rozier scored 20 of those 36 points in the fourth quarter alone, as well as Charlotte’s final 10 points in the last 78 seconds. This was “Scary Terry” at his absolute best. Rozier looked like the all-star three-point demigod Saturday night (Rozier was 8 for 11 from three) rather than the absent Curry. Before his game-winner, Rozier also had hit a 45-foot heave at the halftime buzzer.
“I just seen one go through, I seen two go through and then it felt like the ocean,” Rozier said of his shooting night. “My teammates and my coaches did a great job down the stretch – they got me the rock and we made it happen.”
Curry had been looking forward to his annual trip to play in the place he grew up all season. He always mentally circles the game in Charlotte.
“It’s always special,” Curry said Tuesday. “It’s always what I look at first when the schedule comes out. You know my Dad (Dell Curry) is still doing his thing, a color commentator on the (Hornets) broadcast, and I’ve still got family all throughout the 704 and 980 (area codes). So it’s awesome to come back and play and be around familiar sights and sounds and all that.”
And when he came out for warmups Saturday, everything looked fine. I got to the arena early to watch, since Curry’s warmup is always a show in itself.
At one point, the former Davidson star lined up 40 feet from the basket, at the Hornets’ Buzz City logo, and made three out of four shots.
At another, he saw his father Dell Curry, the former Hornets star, standing about 50 yards away and called out happily to him. Dell waved back. I watched a bit of the warmups with Dell. Through masks, we chit-chatted about how nice it would be to finally see Steph play a game at the Spectrum Center after a two-year absence.
Nothing seemed wrong, at least not outwardly. Curry did his full shooting routine, finishing about 40 minutes before the game and joining his team in the locker room. He came back and shot a little more with his teammates after that.
But Kerr said in between those two times that Curry wasn’t feeling well and saw the Charlotte Hornets team doctor just before the game.
Shortly before tip-off, Curry sat on a basketball, with Kerr and several other Warrior officials bending down to talk to him. Not long after that, Curry left the court with a Warriors trainer.
On TV, Dell sounded initially as flummoxed as everyone else when Steph, announced as a starter over the loudspeaker, never came back onto the court.
A minute into the game, play-by-play announcer Eric Collins said on-air: “Dell, where’s Steph?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Dell Curry said. Then: “Want me to send a text to his phone?”
Curry’s last-second DNP continued a streak of recent bad luck for him in Charlotte. He’s now missed three of his last four possible games in Charlotte against the Hornets. In his 12-year career, Curry has faced the Hornets fewer times (16) than anyone else.
At least no huge Curry fans spent big bucks for this one and then got disappointed. Curry’s return to Charlotte in a non-COVID year generally is one of the biggest draws of the season, often luring around 19,000 fans — many of them wearing No. 30 jerseys and ecstatic to see Curry in his one game in Charlotte per year. This year the Hornets have yet to sell their first seat to the general public, so that wasn’t a factor.
After all that, there was still a game to play, and it was an ugly one most of the way. The game’s one-name stars were all extremely quiet for three quarters. Steph was out. LaMelo and Draymond had zero points between them until late in the third quarter and had shot a combined 0-for-10.
And the Hornets, who were a whole lot closer to full strength than the Warriors were, found themselves in a dogfight the entire game. With LaMelo Ball (7 points, 7 assists, 5 turnovers) in foul trouble early and Hayward (13 points) having a relatively quiet game, it was left to Rozier to keep the Hornets in it, which he somehow did with that unbelievable 20-point fourth quarter.
Charlotte (14-15) finally came all the way back, helped by Green (whose back-to-back technicals were called for taunting and cursing both his opponents and the officials) and then pushed over the top by Rozier.
Rozier was first lifted up by Ball after the game and then gently placed on the floor, where his teammates pounded his back and threw water on him and the Warriors walked off in silence.
For a midseason NBA contest, it was some kind of night.
“I’ve never seen a game like that end that way in that type of fashion,” Hornets coach James Borrego said. “I’m not sure we’ll ever see that again.”
This story was originally published February 20, 2021 at 10:49 PM.
