What It Means to Miss Steph Curry

Credit where it's due: Klay Thompson tried.

But the crowd didn't gather at the Warriors' end of the court ninety minutes before tip-off to watch anyone try anything. They came to watch Steph Curry be Steph Curry. Some of them were Warriors fans. About as many were Mavericks fans. It didn't much matter. Sometimes, you don't root for athletes so much as you stare at them, the way you might stare at Niagara Falls, or at David Copperfield if he warmed up ninety minutes before every show by casually making cocktail waitresses vanish into thin air.

Some of the people cramming into the first two rows of the American Airlines Center in Dallas to get closer to the court had probably heard the news already: Steph Curry was out with a strained hamstring. But these were the Warriors, and this is just what you do before a Warriors game this season.

The Warriors are the hottest ticket in basketball, maybe in sports, and part of getting your money's worth is getting there early to watch their routine. They're better than every other team in the NBA, and a casual fan could tell you that by simply watching them warm up. Undisturbed by defenders, Curry casually knocks down 26-foot jump shots like they're free throws and dribbles numerous basketballs like he's controlling them with invisible strings. It's hypnotic, and enough to convince any skeptic that they're about to witness the highest form of basketball imaginable once the ball gets tipped.

So when Klay Thompson went over to the spot, just out of bounds next to the baseline, a few people perked up. It was where Curry—a man whom Dallas coach Rick Carlisle had just compared in his pre-game press conference to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for the way he is revolutionizing basketball—normally would do his now-famous dribbling routine. Curry gets in a squatting stance and dribbles two basketballs in unison, putting them between his legs every couple bounces. Thompson did a version of this using one basketball, and he dribbled it off of his foot. Twice.

Then he stepped behind the three-point line to start shooting. Thompson is, in his own right, one of the best shooters on the planet. "This should be good," you could almost feel the contingent of fans saying to themselves. It wasn't that he didn't live up to expectations. Thompson took a number of passes from an assistant coach, squared up to the basket, and made the majority of his shots. It's just that watching Klay Thompson shooting threes before a game looks exactly like what it is: a guy practicing basketball. That is, exactly the same and totally different from what Steph Curry does before a game.

The crowd also saw Andre Iguodala aimlessly walking around the court, bricking unfocused jumpers while wearing a sleeveless hoodie, which in the context of the ultra-exciting, record-breaking, defending champion, best-show-in-town Warriors might be seen as a metaphor for Iguodala's funky, off-kilter game. In any other context, a sleeveless hoodie is just impractical to the point of being inexplicable. Kind of like showing up an hour and a half early for a basketball game in December.

As for the rest of the show, uh, there was Andrew Bogut working on his free throws. When he reached the agreed-upon number of makes, which took quite a while, assistant coach Jarron Collins gave him a thumbs-up, to which Bogut responded with a thumbs-up of his own before leaving the court. No cool handshake, no quick celebratory dunk. Just a thumbs-up.

The inclusive nature of Steph's transcendence is hard to pin down. Maybe we can blame how quickly Curry went from what he was (very good player in the league) to what he is now (in the conversation of greatest ever). Four years ago, people wouldn't have predicted this level of excitement for him any more than they would for, say, Ricky Rubio. So it seems like Curry and the rest of the Warriors made this leap together; in a way, they did, but Curry went much higher and is much more responsible for his team's leap than the other way around. If everyone already knew this, it has become even clearer in Curry's recent absence.

Which is not to say that the supporting cast of Golden State isn't fun. They are, in large part because the system they play makes the entertainment value look like a collective effort. The Warriors play a that squeezes every ounce of fun out of each player, including Curry, but the success of this system, and the fun of it, has so much to do with the constant prospect of Curry doing something incredible. When anything else happens, it's like when someone taps the top of your head and says "duck" in a game of Duck, Duck, Goose.

Dallas's 114-91 beatdown of the Warriors wasn't indicative of Golden State's inability to win games without Curry. They came out sluggish and were also missing Festus Ezeli, Leandro Barbosa, and Harrison Barnes. The next night, they defeated the Rockets behind 38 points from Thompson. Saturday, Curry briefly returned for 14 minutes against Denver before aggravating his leg. Draymond Green tallied a monster triple-double and the Warriors squeaked by the lowly Nuggets in overtime. These Warriors have a handful of players whom every other team in the league would give a maximum contract without blinking. They're just not the type of players worth marking your calendar so you can watch warm up.

As an extension of Curry, Green is the versatile tough guy, the physical embodiment of Steph's swagger. Watching him be semi-successfully defended by Charlie Villanueva and Dwight Powell in the loss to Dallas was a reminder of Curry's trickle-down effect in likeability. Without Curry, people might have (unfairly) tagged Green as a master of none who never shuts up. In fact, they did tag him as such until Curry became great. The perception is that Green also improved in that time, which he did, but this is all related.

Likewise, people pay to see the Splash Brothers, sure, but between Curry and Klay, there's no question of who's the favored sibling. Of course, the Warriors are more exciting for having these specific players in their roles, but they're all still secondary to Steph. William H. Macy and Gary Oldman can give great performances alongside Daniel Day Lewis, but that doesn't necessarily make it an ensemble film.

The Warriors, as a team, have already earned countless comparisons to the 90s-era Bulls, and it follows that Curry has been held up to Michael Jordan time and time again. Curry is a different type of star, playing in a different NBA, but missing out on him feels like missing out on Jordan, as any fan who turned up for those Curry-free warm-ups in Dallas could tell you. That might be the most impressive thing about him.