Steph Curry gets best of fellow alien Victor Wembanyama as Warriors beat Spurs originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
SAN ANTONIO – We’re being duped and deceived more and more every day.
The internet feels less real every time we take out our phones and wonder if what we’re mindlessly scrolling past is AI or the latest trend that will fade away and get lost in the shuffle. Deep down, we want to believe. The belief fuels us and makes us fools all at the same time.
Thousands of UFO sightings already have been recorded this year with 50 days still remaining in 2025. Thousands. They create stories and eye rolls. Fuel, and fools. Aliens are among us.
Ask the 18,578 fans in the building to watch the Warriors and San Antonio Spurs for four quarters on Wednesday night and you yourself can become a believer, if you somehow aren’t already.
There were 21 players who ran up and down the court at Frost Bank Center in the Warriors’ 125-120 win, with two aliens taking center stage. A basketball fanatic and a baby who can barely open its eyes could point out which person was taken from a French hovercraft and dropped down on San Antonio to reign supreme on the basketball world.
Squint hard enough and you can see it. Watch him for more than a decade like Steve Kerr has and you know it by now. Oh yeah, the second alien is the one whose head is at the waist of Alien No. 1, Victor Wembanyama, when he’s flying in the air at him, but the ball sails over his outstretched left arm and through the net without touching a single part of the rim from the right corner.
“All it takes is that one shot, and in that third quarter I feel like he hit that 3-pointer that finally went down. And when that went down, the corner one, it was like, ‘Here we go,’ ” Al Horford said. “Then it was just … they were in trouble.”
Steph Curry threw both his hands up as a thank you to the heavens. Maybe to the overlords who graced his right hand at birth, too. It was a gesture of finally. They, being the Spurs, were in trouble.
“Thankfully, I made one,” Curry said. “Got a rhythm going and felt like I could make a couple more. It was a good second half.”
Indeed.
Curry scored 46 points one night after he and his Warriors teammates were embarrassed in Oklahoma City by the defending NBA champions in his first game back from an illness, scoring only 11 points against the Thunder’s machine-like defense. He admitted he still was battling a cold, which was clear when he spoke, hoping to play 24 hours later against the Spurs.
“Looks like he’s almost fully healthy,” Gary Payton II said. “Almost fully healthy. He probably would have gotten 50 if he was fully healthy. I’ll take the 46. Just to see him in a good rhythm is encouraging for everybody.”
Getting one game back under his belt helped Curry. His congestion still is there, but his lungs felt way different. Night and day, like the product Steph and the Warriors displayed against Wembanyama and the rising Spurs.
That three over Wembanyama actually was Curry’s second of the game, with his first being a circus shot from the left corner in the first quarter while trying to draw a foul on former Warriors teammate Harrison Barnes. The third quarter, however, is when flames started firing from his fingers.
Even after missing his first 3-point attempt of the second half.
Once he sneakily ran behind Wembanyama from the left side of the court and found his way to the right corner where Jimmy Butler found him in mid-air, it was game on. Curry in the third quarter alone scored 22 points, six fewer than the Spurs did as a team. In nine minutes.
He made three 3-pointers in three different ways during his third-quarter flurry, banked two 2-pointers – first from the right side and then the left – and forced his way to nine free throws. Yes, he made all nine.
Kerr jokingly used the word “routine” to describe Curry’s night in totality that also included five rebounds, five assists, five threes, two steals and 15 made free throws with just one miss.
“I’ve seen this,” Kerr continued. “How many times has he scored 40 in his career?”
The answer: 73.
“I’m kidding, obviously,” Kerr continued. “That was not routine. When you have the privilege with Steph for 11-plus years like I have, you get used to this. He’s the reason this whole thing has happened. He’s our Tim Duncan. He’s the sun in our solar system.”
Starring alongside Curry were the two who round out a Big Three on the other side of 35 years old. Jimmy Butler was Batman’s Robin with 28 points, six rebounds, eight assists and three steals. Draymond Green was their enforcer, making one of his 10 shot attempts but still finishing as a game-high plus-15 as he made Wembanyama fight as hard as he could for 31 points, throwing him out of whack for a season-high eight turnovers – the second-most in the Spurs star’s career.
It still all starts with Curry. It’s timeless. It’s art. It’s a Broadway show.
It’s an alien lifeform in a 6-foot-2 body that has outgrown his previous Baby-Faced Assassin nickname.
“You always have a chance when he’s on the floor, especially when he’s making incredible shots like he was,” Butler said. “That’s what we need, that’s what he’s going to give us. He’s going to do what he does. It’s our job, everybody else, to do what we’re supposed to do. The role players are the ones that are really going to win, and I’m one of those as well. The star is going to do what he does.”
Butler continued, sharing what he calls The Art of Getting Out The Way: “Give the ball to 30, and get out the way. The talent will create the disadvantage, and I think that’s what we focused on tonight. Give the ball to Steph, get out the way, and let Steph do what he’s been doing for so many years in this league and good things happen.”
Aliens are among us. One is known as Wemby. The other is named Wardell. You might know him as Steph.
