Key Points
Bullet point summary by AI
- The Warriors enter their Play-In Tournament matchup against the Clippers with significant injury concerns after a brutal 2025-26 season.
- Head coach Steve Kerr announced that three key contributors, including Steph Curry, will be on a minutes restriction.
- The strategic dilemma highlights whether prioritizing long-term health is worthwhile when the immediate postseason survival hangs in the balance.
Few teams have dealt with the level of misfortune that the Golden State Warriors have in 2025-26. After coming into the season with title aspirations, those hopes quickly died after Jimmy Butler went down with a torn ACL in January. Couple that with the fact that Stephen Curry has only appeared in 43 games (his fewest since 2019-20) and that the Warriors have over 100 more man games lost due to injury than the next-highest team, and it shouldn't be surprising that they are 37-45.
However, thanks to the bottom-feeders of the Western Conference (and some poor injury luck for the New Orleans Pelicans), Golden State still finds themselves in the play-in mix. Unfortunately, it sounds like their post-regular season stint will be extremely short-lived.
Key Warriors' players will be on a minutes restriction in a must-win game
To stay alive, the Warriors must beat the Los Angeles Clippers on Wednesday night. Outside of Butler, it seems like Golden State will have all their guys available to them for this do-or-die contest. However, according to head coach Steve Kerr, a few of them will be facing a minutes restriction.
On Sunday, Kerr told media that Curry, Al Horford, and Kristaps Porzingis will all have a cap on the amount they will play. All of them will play under 40 minutes against the Clippers.
This decision is likely out of Kerr's control and is coming from the team's medical staff. In today's NBA, it isn't atypical for teams to use these practices in the hopes of reducing the risk for re-injury. In this instance, though, it poses an interesting existential question: what good is it to prepare for the future, if said future can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye?
It is one thing to restrict players when you are in the regular season and already guaranteed a chance at the play-in tournament. Heck, I can even see a team that is a seventh/eighth seed being willing to risk losing the first game, knowing that they will have a second chance to punch their ticket to the postseason against the winner of the nine/ten matchup (although even this is a pretty big gamble).
But when you are the Warriors and the odds are already greatly stacked in your favor (winning two games against competitive teams is never an easy task), it is a really bad look to say you are going to load manage several marquee guys in what could be your final game of the season, especially when your opponent has seven more wins than you.
In reality, a 40 minute cap on playing time is still a lot to work with, but at this time of the year, you need to be able to run your best players to the ground. On the season, Curry and Porzingis are two of the Warriors top three players in Estimated Plus-Minus (per Dunks & Threes). Meanwhile, Horford is one of the most battle-tested players in the association.
At the end of the day, there is a very real chance that Golden State can beat the Clippers and the losers of the Phoenix Suns/Portland Trail Blazers without any of those three ever eclipsing 40 minutes played in an individual game.
But for Kerr to come out and say that is pretty mind-boggling, which, in a weird way, sums up this season for Golden State pretty nicely.
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