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The clock may be ticking on Steph Curry’s career, but there’s no doubt this is still his Warriors team.
Ahead of Golden State’s Christmas Day showdown against the Lakers, the four-time NBA champion called a players-only meeting Wednesday, ESPN reports.
If the intimate talk got anyone’s head straight, it was Curry, himself — the 36-year-old star dropped a game-high 38 points, but it still wasn’t enough to lift Golden State above LeBron James.
James paced the Lakers with 31 points and 10 assists, and the 115-113 win lifted Los Angeles to a 17-13 record, good for sixth place in the Western conference.
Curry and the Warriors, meanwhile, lost their second straight to fall to 15-14. After scorching out of the gate at 12-3, Golden State has lost 11 of its past 14.
Curry’s players-only meeting certainly had much to do with that steep drop-off.
“It is an inflection point on, obviously, which direction our season can go,” Curry said after the loss. “Our last 14 games, it’s just been tough trying to find any type of momentum or consistency, and through that, you just can’t lose spirit and belief that we’re a good enough team to figure it out because this league is ruthless.”
Golden State’s front office certainly agrees there. Notwithstanding the plethora of letdown losses over the past month, or the downward trending play of the greatest shooter in the history of the game, Warriors brass continues to bolster their roster at the expense of draft capital.
Point guard Dennis Schroder was recently acquired from the Nets for three future second-round selections.
Through his first four games with the Warriors, Schroder is averaging 8.5 points and four assists across 27 minutes per game.
Schroder posted 11 points and shot 3-of-10 from the field in the loss to the Lakers.
“Everybody’s disappointed, head coach Steve Kerr said in his postgame presser. “We’ve lost some confidence. You can feel it. We had a great vibe early in the season, and we’re going through it right now.
“But I love our guys, high-character guys. They care. They care about each other. I believe in them. I believe we’re going to get this thing turned around, so this is all part of the season, part of life.”
Curry did all he could to get the Warriors back into the win column, shooting 14-of-24 overall and 8-of-15 from beyond the arc. Seventeen of his 38 points, including two 3-pointers in the span of five seconds, came in the fourth quarter.
The game was knotted at 113 apiece with 7.6 seconds left, but a driving layup from Austin Reeves with 1.7 seconds left secured the Lakers their Christmas Day win.
“I still have hope and faith and confidence that we can figure it out — it’s how I’m built” Curry said. “And I feel like you go out there and you talk about it, but how you execute, how you show up on a nightly basis, the effort we’re giving, even considering what our record’s been over the last stretch, [we’re] a team that’s desperate to figure it out, [but it] just hasn’t gone our way. So yeah, until things change, you got to keep that mentality.”