Curry Limps Off Open Practice, Then Practices in Full and Is Expected to Face the Lakers

Golden State’s season nearly lurched before it started, in front of the fans who had come to watch a practice. Midway through Sunday’s open scrimmage at Chase Center, Stephen Curry rolled his right ankle on a dribble move, stopped the session, banged the ball on the floor and limped to the locker room. By Monday morning he had taken part in a full practice, and the Warriors expect him on the floor when the season opens against the Lakers in Los Angeles on Wednesday.

What happened at Sunday’s open practice?

Curry rolled the ankle on a move from the right wing, midway through the scrimmage, TSN reports. The reaction inside the building is what made the clip travel: play stopped, Curry banged the basketball on the floor in frustration, teammates showed immediate concern, and he limped down the tunnel in front of a quiet arena of fans and did not come back, Hoops Rumors reports. Open practices are supposed to be the softest content of the season. This one produced the most anxious hour of Golden State’s autumn, three days before the opener.

Why did the first fear point at his knee?

Because the knee is the recent history. Curry missed 27 games last season with a persistent right knee problem, the Associated Press reports, and spent the summer reconfiguring his routine to manage it. When a 38-year-old guard limps out holding the same leg, the arena assumes the known injury before it waits for the actual one. The correction came quickly: Kerr said it was an ankle tweak and not the knee, and ESPN’s Anthony Slater reported a team source describing the tweak as not serious, Hoops Rumors reports. An ankle roll in October is a scare. A recurrence of the knee problem would have been a season story, which is why the distinction was the whole news on Sunday night.

What changed on Monday?

The ankle answered the question itself. Curry was a full participant in practice on Monday morning, TSN reports, after the ankle responded well overnight and the medical staff cleared him to keep building toward the regular season. Kerr told reporters Curry will play on Wednesday, Hoops Rumors reports, with one more practice on Tuesday still to come. The sequence matters for how these scares usually run: a viral limp on Sunday, a one-word reassurance on Sunday night, and then the only evidence that settles it, the player doing everything at practice the next morning. Golden State got all three steps inside 24 hours.

Why are the Warriors managing Curry’s workload so openly?

Because they have said the quiet part in advance. Kerr told reporters this week that the team will rest Curry and its other veterans in some situations, particularly back-to-backs, and warned fans to look at the schedule before buying tickets, because managing the older players is the only way through the season, NBC Sports reports, via Nick Friedell of The Athletic. Curry’s preseason minutes and practice time were already lightened before Sunday. The contrast inside the same camp is Dalen Terry playing 43 preseason minutes on an Exhibit 10 deal: at one end of the roster a young player is being given every minute available to audition, and at the other the franchise player is being wrapped early and often, on a two-year, $116 million extension that keeps him near the top of the league’s highest-paid players into his forties.

Who else is missing for Golden State on Wednesday?

Most of the planned starting group around him. Jimmy Butler III and Moses Moody are both rehabbing serious knee injuries and are expected back midseason, NBC Sports reports. Kristaps Porzingis remains out indefinitely with the health issue the club has never put a name or a date to, and he will not travel to Los Angeles, TSN reports; the desk has tracked that absence since the Warriors said they did not know where Porzingis was. Brandin Podziemski missed Monday’s practice with lower back tightness and is questionable, TSN reports. Kerr has already leaned toward a smaller starting lineup in Porzingis’s absence, the one that puts rookie Yaxel Lendeborg, who admitted he was spooked to be told he would guard Luka Doncic in the preseason, straight into the opener’s deep end.

What happens next for Curry and the Warriors?

Tuesday’s practice and the official injury report are the last formal checkpoints, and then the game itself becomes the test: an ankle that survived a full practice still has to survive Doncic’s Lakers at full speed. The Warriors’ month has been a study in two kinds of availability, the managed kind, where a star’s minutes are planned down to the practice, and the unknown kind, where a starting center has no timeline at all. Sunday’s video briefly suggested Curry might join the second category. Monday’s practice put him back in the first.