note: during august, bang! will publish friday editions only.
there is a summer where stephen curry behaves like everybody else in his position.
in that summer he says nothing for three weeks and the silence does the work. somebody close to him mentions, without mentioning it, that eighteen seasons is a long time. a reporter he trusts gets a call in the second week of july. two front offices run the math on what a trade would cost, the math finds its way out, and the leak does the negotiating. by august the franchise is negotiating with a man who has already shown it the door.
that summer did not happen. curry spent a weekend in late july at a charity golf tournament in north little rock, arkansas, because a teammate rehabilitating a torn patellar tendon asked him to be there. he has said for a decade that he wants to finish having worn one jersey. nobody has ever described him, anywhere, as a player who pressures his front office.
the summer around him moved almost everybody else. giannis antetokounmpo to miami. jaylen brown to philadelphia. ja morant to portland, lamelo ball to minnesota, kawhi leonard to toronto once the league finishes looking at the clippers. forty-one players changed teams by trade this offseason, six more than signed elsewhere as free agents. the modern way to move is to be moved. the speculation attached to curry stayed speculation, and none of it came from him.
golden state finished 37-45 last season, tenth in the west, and lost the second play-in game in phoenix on the seventeenth of april. the roster that lost it is coming back close to intact. one rookie was added. lebron james was chased and missed.
on the twenty-ninth of august curry becomes eligible to sign a two-year extension worth $136.7 million. twenty-two days from now. he is thirty-eight, entering his eighteenth season, in the final year of a maximum contract paying him over $63 million.
the reading everybody is doing is a loyalty reading. does he sign, does he wait, does the most patient superstar of his generation finally run out of patience and ask for the thing he has never asked for. good question, and it gets answered in public, probably in september, probably quietly.
golden state answered a different question months ago, and the answer is written into a season nobody has played yet.
