Developing Re-Evaluated in Two Weeks" Is a Calendar Entry, Not a Prognosis. The Warriors' Eight-Game Streak Was Stephen Curry, and DraftKings Has Them at 40-to-1.

The Warriors said on Thursday morning that an MRI "confirmed that Curry has an oblique abdominal tear" and that he "will be re-evaluated in two (2) weeks." Stephen Curry left Wednesday's game in Houston with 6:25 left in the first quarter and did not come back. Golden State lost 115-108, which ended an eight-game winning streak, its longest since 2022.

Read the team's sentence again. It does not say he returns in two weeks. It says a doctor looks at him in two weeks. ESPN's own report alongside the game story had the range at two to four weeks, and NBC Sports' Eric Samulski, counting from the schedule, has him missing at least the next seven games. The number in the statement is the floor.

The shot that did it

ESPN's Anthony Slater had the sequence. Curry began grabbing his right side a few minutes into the game and kept glancing at the training staff. With 7:22 left in the first he came off a Draymond Green screen and made a three from 28 feet, shouted as he released it, and signalled to the bench. It was his only basket. He went to the locker room with a member of the medical staff and was ruled out early in the second quarter.

Steve Kerr, afterwards: "He said he tweaked something in his abdominal area and said he's never done it before." And: "Concern is high. But I have no idea the extent." Curry left for the MRI at halftime after telling teammates, by Slater's account, to keep their minds on the game.

He is 38. An injury a player has "never done before" at that age is the detail we would underline, more than the word "tear."

What the streak was made of

Curry went into Wednesday at 30.6 points a game, second in the league. The team's statement, which folds in his three-point night, has him at 27.8 on 50% shooting and 45.7% from three across 10 games. The Associated Press notes he was Golden State's leading scorer in six of the eight straight wins.

Now look at who else is missing. Jimmy Butler and Moses Moody are rehabbing long-term knee injuries. Kristaps Porzingis, the projected starting centre, is away from the team; ESPN says he has stepped away from basketball and NBC Sports lists an illness, and we do not know more than that. Backup guard Brandon Williams has a strained hamstring and is out at least a week. That is four rotation players before Curry.

So the 8-4 record was built on an unusually narrow base: one all-time shooter scoring 30 a night at 38, a rookie, and a supporting cast already thinned. The thesis here is not complicated. A team like that does not lose its best player for "two weeks." It finds out what it is.

The schedule does not help

Golden State is in the middle of a five-game road trip. Next is San Antonio on Friday; the Spurs are 10-2. Then, by HITC's listing, New Orleans, Dallas and Memphis, all away, before Boston and Sacramento at home. The outlets' calendars disagree by a day on several of those dates, so we are giving opponents and not dates. Call it six or seven games inside the stated window and more if the re-evaluation is not a clearance.

The Warriors are sixth in the West and two and a half games behind the 11-2 Lakers in the Pacific. A 2-5 stretch would put them back near .500 in a conference where the Lakers, Spurs and Rockets have lost seven games between them.

What the market said

Sports Illustrated's Peter Dewey reports Golden State at +4000 to win the title at DraftKings after the announcement, with its playoff odds taken off the board and Curry at +9000 for MVP. A price of +4000 is an implied probability of about 2.4% before the book's margin is taken out.

We would like to tell you what the price was on Wednesday afternoon. Dewey does not give one, saying only that the Warriors had been "climbing up the odds boards," and we did not find a dated pre-injury number from a named book. Without it, nobody can honestly say how far the market moved. What we can say is that 40-to-1 is where a book puts a team it does not expect in the conversation, and the streak had apparently not persuaded anyone to price them much shorter than that.

Draymond Green's argument

The best case against all of this came from Green on Wednesday night. Asked about playing without Curry, he pointed to the roster: this group, he said, is better equipped than last year's, and "I think that puts us in a better position to be successful without him." He named Yaxel Lendeborg and Brandin Podziemski.

He has evidence. Lendeborg, a rookie, had 25 points and 10 rebounds in Houston. Podziemski had 22. Down 19-10 when Curry walked off, the Warriors tied the game on the road against a 9-3 team and lost by seven. De'Anthony Melton gave them 11 points, 4 rebounds and 4 assists in 25 minutes and probably starts. They are 1-1 this season in games Curry has missed. And HITC's rundown of the schedule marks two of the next six opponents, New Orleans and Sacramento, as likely wins even without him.

We take that seriously, and it is why this piece does not say the season is over. But the comparison Green is inviting is with a team that went 13-26 without Curry and finished 37-45. "Better than that" clears a low bar. One good night from a rookie in a loss is a data point, and NBC Sports reports that Kerr plans to limit Lendeborg's workload, which is the sensible thing to do with a first-year player and the opposite of what a team leaning on him would need.

The oblique itself is the other unknown. NBC Sports notes that recent cases around the league have run two to three weeks, and also that Paolo Banchero once missed 34 games with one. Those are very different injuries with the same name, and the Warriors have not said where on that spectrum this sits.

What would change the picture

If Golden State splits the six games in the window, Green was right and 40-to-1 is too long for a team that gets a 30-point scorer back by December. If it goes 1-5 or worse, the streak was Curry and the standings will say so before he is re-examined. And if the re-evaluation around Thanksgiving produces another re-evaluation date instead of a return, treat every number in this piece as optimistic.