Stephen Curry could have asked for $136 million. He settled for $116 million.
The two-year extension he agreed to on Sept. 26 runs through the 2028-29 season, which would be his 20th with Golden State, and it came in $20 million under what he was eligible to receive. General manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. called it an agreement the team "couldn't be more excited" about.
The more useful question for the next seven months is what the Warriors do with the goodwill.
What 37-45 actually looked like
Last season was not a collapse so much as a slow leak. Golden State finished 37-45, 10th in the West, and needed Curry's 35 points to win a play-in game at the Clippers on April 15. Two nights later the Suns ended it, 111-96, with Curry held to 4-of-16 shooting.
He played only 43 games because of a right knee injury, and still averaged 26.6 points. Without him, the scoring load fell to Brandin Podziemski at 13.8 points and Moses Moody at 12.1, and that is the whole problem in two numbers. When the 38-year-old sits, nobody on this roster has shown he can carry an offense for a week, never mind a month.
The help that isn't here yet
On paper, the Warriors added a second star. In February they sent Jonathan Kuminga and Buddy Hield to Atlanta for Kristaps Porzingis, then re-signed the big man this summer for two years and $40 million. In 15 games in blue and gold he averaged 16.1 points.
He will not be in Honolulu this week. Dunleavy said Monday that Porzingis will be sidelined indefinitely by a health issue the team learned of a day earlier, and declined to say whether it is connected to the condition that sidelined him in the past.
Jimmy Butler, 37, is rehabbing a torn ACL from January and is in the last year of his contract. Moody is coming back from a ruptured patellar tendon suffered in March. The team says both have reached very light on-court work. Neither has a return date.
