Stephen Curry has missed 10 games since first suffering a strained adductor injury and the Golden State Warriors have clearly missed him through a rough stretch of this start of the season. Head coach Steve Kerr said that all signs pointed to him being ready to go, but chose to declare he would return on Saturday against the Detroit Pistons, choosing to hold him out of a bar-measuring matchup against the best team in the league in the 18-4 Toronto Raptors.
“If this were a playoff game, he would absolutely be playing,” Kerr said of Curry, according to Mark Medina of the San Jose Mercury News. “But it’s November.”
Kerr heeded the advice of head physical trainer Rick Celebrini, who has worked closely with Curry throughout his recovery and thought a couple days of added rest would minimize his risk of re-injuring his groin.
Curry has been out for three weeks after initially sustaining the injury, one that normally doesn't take this long to recover from, but the Warriors have been awful careful, given that he's never experienced a groin injury of this kind during his nine-year tenure in the league.
“We’re never going to look back and go, ‘Man I wish we played him in Toronto.’ But the opposite would definitely be true,” Kerr said. “We could look back and say, ‘What were we thinking? Why didn’t we give him another couple of days? Caution is the word of the day.”
The Warriors had this very regret in 2017-18 after thrusting him back into the lineup six games after he suffered an ankle injury against the San Antonio Spurs, playing 25 minutes against the Atlanta Hawks before exiting the game with a re-injury to that ankle and missing the last 10 games of the regular season and the first five of the postseason.
Needless to say, Kerr and company have taken that setback as a lesson learned.
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