Curry milestone, then ankle scare

Stephen Curry hit the milestone and then gave Golden State a different kind of scare in the same night: he scored 11 points against Sacramento on April 10, passed Tim Duncan for 19th on the National Basketball Association’s all-time scoring list, and later limped after tweaking his right ankle in a 124-118 loss. (nba.com, nba.com, espn.com) The scoring jump was tiny in raw numbers and huge in context: Curry entered the night with 26,476 career points, Duncan had 26,496, and Curry’s 11-point game moved him to 26,487, enough to slide past a Hall of Fame power forward who built his total over 1,392 games. (nba.com, espn.com) That tells you what kind of scorer Curry has become late in his career. He is 38, he has played 1,068 regular-season games, and he is climbing a list usually dominated by taller players who lived at the rim or the foul line, while Curry built much of his case from 3-point range. (espn.com, nba.com) The timing made the ankle twist feel louder than it might in January. Golden State is locked into the 10th seed in the Western Conference, which means the Warriors need to win two play-in games just to reach the full playoff bracket. (nba.com) That is a brutal setup for any team leaning on one star guard. A top-six seed gets a week to reset and a seven-game series to survive mistakes, but the 10th seed gets almost no margin and no room for a compromised lead scorer. (nba.com) The Warriors were already treating this stretch like emergency prep. The April 10 game was only the second time Curry and Kristaps Porzingis had played together after Curry returned from a 27-game absence caused by a knee injury, and Steve Kerr said before the game he wanted those two to get as much time together as possible in the final two regular-season games. (nba.com) So the ankle scare lands on top of a team that still looks half-assembled. Curry played 27 minutes against Sacramento, finished with 11 points, five assists, three rebounds, and two steals, and Golden State still lost despite Brandin Podziemski scoring a career-high 30. (nba.com, nba.com) The first bit of relief came after the game. ESPN reported that Kerr said Curry tweaked his right ankle and is expected to play in the regular-season finale against the Los Angeles Clippers on Sunday, April 12, with Golden State trying to sharpen Curry’s rhythm and conditioning before the play-in. (espn.com) That leaves the story in an awkward place that fits the Warriors’ whole season. Curry just added another line to a résumé that already includes 4,000 career three-pointers and four championships, but Golden State’s next week still depends less on the history book than on whether his right ankle holds up for 48 more minutes at a time. (nba.com, espn.com)