Stephen Curry Played Ten Games Without Jimmy Butler Last Season. Golden State Went 4-6.
Butler tore his right ACL on January 19 and has not played since. Moses Moody ruptured a patellar tendon on March 23 and has no return date. Both men are still out, Curry is not, and that combination has fifty-seven minutes a night to give away and ten games of evidence behind it.
Jimmy Butler III played 20 minutes and 50 seconds on the night of January 19 and scored 17 points. Golden State beat Miami 135-112 at Chase Center and moved to 25-19. His right knee buckled on an awkward landing, the ACL tore, and that was his season. The club announced successful surgery on February 9.
Two months later Moses Moody went up for an uncontested dunk after a steal against Dallas, ruptured the patellar tendon in his left knee, and that was his season. The Warriors won that game too, 137-131, and stood 34-38. They finished 37-45, tenth in the West, beat the Clippers in the play-in and lost to Phoenix.
Neither man has a date to come back. Butler's rehab is going well and nobody has attached a game to it. Moody's club update is scheduled for training camp in September. The season opens October 21 at the Lakers.
The season splits four ways and every row reconciles#
Golden State played 82 regular-season games. Butler appeared in 38 of them and Stephen Curry in 43. Sorting all 82 by which of the two was available gives four groups, and the four groups add back to 37-45 exactly.
| Available | Games | Record |
|---|---|---|
| Curry and Butler | 33 | 20-13 |
| Curry, no Butler | 10 | 4-6 |
| Butler, no Curry | 5 | 3-2 |
| Neither | 34 | 10-24 |
Thirty-three plus ten plus five plus thirty-four is 82. Twenty plus four plus three plus ten is 37. The rest is 45.
The top row is a .606 team over a 33-game sample, which across a full season is roughly a fifty-win pace. The bottom row is a lottery team over a sample almost exactly as large. Golden State spent an equal share of last season being each of them.
The row Golden State is about to live in is the second one#
Curry is not carrying an injury into camp. Nothing reported this summer says he is limited, and Mike Dunleavy has said publicly that he hopes Curry plays more than the 43 games he managed last year. Butler will not be available in October and, on the most specific reporting published, is not expected in November or December either. Brett Siegel of ClutchPoints reported on August 26 that there have been no setbacks and some hints that Butler is slightly ahead of schedule, and in the same paragraph that it is probably unrealistic to expect him back before early 2027. Ben Golliver, writing for ESPN the same week, called the timing still unclear.
So the opening months are the second row. Ten games, 4-6.
Ten games is a small sample and it is not one roster. Kristaps Porzingis arrived from Atlanta on February 5 and played only 15 games here. Quinten Post played 67 games last season, Pat Spencer 66 and Buddy Hield 44, and none of the three is on this roster. Four of the ten came in April with a different frontcourt than the six that came in January. What the row is good for is scale rather than prediction: the last time this club had Curry and not Butler, it was a .400 team, and the roster it fielded then was not obviously worse than the one reporting to camp.
Fifty-seven minutes a night, and the men who have to cover them#
Butler averaged 31.1 minutes across his 38 games and scored 20.0 points on 51.9 percent shooting, with 5.6 rebounds, 4.9 assists and 1.4 steals. He turns 37 on September 14. Moody averaged 25.7 minutes across 60 games and 49 starts, scored 12.1 points and shot 40.1 percent from three, which was the best full season of his career.
That is 56.8 minutes a night of last season's rotation, and neither man is expected to play any of it in October.
The players still standing at those positions are Brandin Podziemski, who was the only Warrior to appear in all 82 games and averaged 28.5 minutes; Gui Santos, 68 games at 20.5; Will Richard, 69 games at 20.0; De'Anthony Melton, who missed the first half of last season rehabbing his own ACL and played 49 games at 23.0 minutes; and Gary Payton II, who played 73 games and is 34 years old. Podziemski started 43 of his 82 games and averaged 13.8 points. Santos started 30, Richard 21, Melton 24 and Payton II one.
The club's answer was drafted eleventh#
Yaxel Lendeborg is a 6-foot-9 forward who turns 24 on September 30, three weeks before the opener. He began at Arizona Western College, spent two seasons at UAB and played last season at Michigan. Golden State took him eleventh overall in June.
His Michigan year: 40 games, 30.2 minutes, 15.1 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.2 assists, 51.5 percent from the floor, 67 of 180 from three at 37.2 percent. The workload is the part that reads across. He played 1,206 minutes across a 40-game season, a full season's workload, which is a different preparation from a one-and-done wing arriving at 19.
Anthony Slater, writing in ESPN's Warriors offseason package on August 26, called Lendeborg the club's big addition and said Golden State will rely on him to be a high-minute, high-impact rotation player immediately. That is not a projection about a rookie's ceiling. It is a statement about what the roster requires.
The defense was already the problem#
Golden State allowed 115.6 points per 100 possessions last season, seventeenth of thirty. The offense finished eighteenth. Neither end was good, and the club starts this season without a wing who took 1.4 steals a night and a guard who started 49 games.
Dean Oliver, in the same ESPN package, wrote that the Warriors' defense was actually better with Draymond Green off the court last season, which had happened just one other time in Green's career, and that Green allowed the highest shot quality as closest defender of his career by the GeniusIQ measure. That is one season and one metric, and Green played 68 games at 27.5 minutes, more than anybody on the roster except Curry, Butler and Podziemski. It sits in a package published by the club's own league partner rather than in a hostile column, and Golden State re-signed him in July for one year with no no-trade clause.
October does not ease them in#
The schedule the league published has Golden State opening October 21 at the Lakers, then home for Memphis on the 23rd, then at Phoenix on the 24th, at Denver on the 26th and at Minnesota on the 28th. Four of the first five on the road, all five against Western Conference teams, and the third and fourth games are a back-to-back, home to Memphis and then in Phoenix the next night.
The team that plays those games will have Curry, Green, Porzingis, Horford, Melton, Podziemski, Santos, Richard, Payton II and a rookie. It will not have Butler and it will not have Moody. Ten games of last season looked like that and six of them were losses.
The calls#
Yaxel Lendeborg is in Golden State's starting lineup for the season opener on October 21. The club has 56.8 minutes a night to replace at two positions, it spent the eleventh pick on a forward who played 30 minutes a game in the Big Ten last season, and Slater has already written that the Warriors will rely on him immediately. What would make this wrong is the ordinary thing: Steve Kerr can start Santos or Melton on October 21 and give Lendeborg the identical minutes off the bench, and that costs the club nothing at all.
Jimmy Butler plays fewer than 25 regular-season games for Golden State in 2026-27. The regular season ends April 11. If the most specific published reporting holds and he returns in early February, roughly 30 games remain, and a 37-year-old twelve months off an ACL reconstruction on a team with no reason to hurry him does not play 25 of 30. What would make this wrong is a December return, which one reporter has already hinted at and no club official has said.
This piece said "the third and fourth games are a back-to-back, home to Memphis and then in Phoenix the next night." Memphis on October 23 and Phoenix on October 24 are the second and third games of the season, as the dates in the same paragraph show. They are the club's first back-to-back.
GSP
Sources: Basketball Reference for all 2025-26 games, records, minutes and shooting, for both game logs, for the January 19 and March 23 box scores, and for Lendeborg's college record and date of birth, all read August 31. NBA.com for Butler's injury date, his pre-injury averages, the 25-19 record at the time of the injury and the club's published 2026-27 schedule. Anthony Slater and Ben Golliver, ESPN, August 26, for the Lendeborg role and the return timing. Dean Oliver, same package, for the on-off and shot-quality findings. Brett Siegel, ClutchPoints, August 26, via Hoops Rumors, for the rehab report. Mike Dunleavy's August availabilities via Dalton Johnson, NBC Sports Bay Area, relayed by Hoops Rumors. The Moody injury account and date from the club's own announcement.
