Stephen Curry's Oblique Tear Costs the Warriors Two Weeks

Golden State's season just bent around an MRI. Stephen Curry has been diagnosed with a torn oblique abdominal muscle and will be re-evaluated in two weeks, according to ESPN's Shams Charania. He left Wednesday's game against the Rockets with what the team called right abdominal soreness.

The injury didn't announce itself with a collision. Steve Kerr told reporters that Curry said he "tweaked something" in his abdominal area — the kind of vague, rotational pain that makes basketball people nervous precisely because obliques are involved in every shot, every pass and every change of direction a guard makes.

The timing is cruel. Curry scored 41 points on November 7 in a 126-119 overtime win over Orlando, looking every bit like the engine Golden State still builds everything around. Four days later he's out for at least two weeks, and oblique injuries are notorious for punishing players who rush them — the re-evaluation date is a checkpoint, not a return date.

He's not the Warriors' only medical file this week. Will Richard was cleared to play Wednesday against Houston despite a torn UCL in his left thumb, a remarkable sentence on its own. And Brandon Williams has a mild left hamstring strain, confirmed by MRI, and will be re-evaluated in one week after getting hurt in Monday's 138-87 win over New Orleans.

Two weeks of Warriors basketball without Curry means the offense has to find its gravity somewhere else. Golden State's system bends defenses toward No. 30 whether he has the ball or not. Without him, every set starts from a standstill that opponents don't have to respect the same way.

Curry's durability has been the Warriors' quiet foundation — a 12-time All-Star whose availability across the last decade let Golden State build entire systems on the assumption he'd be standing at the top of the arc. Oblique injuries test a different kind of patience than ankles or knees. They don't hurt when you stand still. They hurt when you do the thing Curry does better than anyone who has ever played: twist, rise and release in one motion, forty times a night.

The Warriors will tell themselves the season is long and November absences don't decide anything. They're right, and it doesn't matter. A torn oblique on a 12-time All-Star is the kind of injury that reorganizes a month — and the re-evaluation in two weeks is now the biggest date on Golden State's calendar.