Lessons from Celtics-Warriors: I am afraid of Stephen Curry

I am irate.

Spare me the silver linings. Spare me the greater good of learning experiences. And most of all, spare me the awe over Stephen Curry hitting an incredible shot and doing the “night night” celebration. Because right now, I’m ticked off.

It has been approximately eleven minutes since the Celtics lost to the Golden State Warriors in a gut-wrenching, post-traumatic-stress-inducing barn burner that had me wondering if a twister had teleported me and Toto back to Game 6 of the 2022 NBA Finals. I’m not calm, and I’m not going to be. So everyone batten down the hatches.

I wanted that game so bad, and judging by how tight and clumsy they played down the stretch, I know the Celtics did too. Their body language made me feel like I was reading All Quiet on the Western Front, as shell-shocked soldiers tried desperately to survive.

The fourth quarter was an onslaught, complete with a Steph Curry legacy game, legacy shot, and legacy celebration. For the first time in my life, I rage-quit watching a game, slamming my computer screen shut as soon as the broadcast cameras cut to Curry’s hands pressed together, forming a pillow for his head and a gravestone for my hopes and dreams.

I don’t know what got into me. This was a regular season game with regular season implications, with a short trip to Sacramento on the horizon to continue the road trip. This isn’t a playoff series; it’s a Tuesday night in December. So we should chill, right?

But I hate the Warriors. I’m pretty young, so there’s a relatively short amount of NBA history that I actually remember. Yet somehow, most of it contains the Warriors winning, either over the entire league, over LeBron James specifically, or—more recently—over the Celtics, who I hold near and dear to my heart.

This game was a form of psychological warfare. The Warriors are in the Western Conference, and meetings with them are few and far between, affording me not many chances like tonight to reflect on the existential horror of peak Steph Curry and how uniquely awful it is to face him.

Flashbacks to the 2022 Finals started to haunt me during the fourth quarter, with Al Horford getting burned in drop coverage on a switch and Jayson Tatum doing a disappearing act in the face of an alpha he couldn’t even begin to match.

There was something cosmically off about that fourth quarter. No rational explanation satisfies what went down. Because even if you blame the C’s for settling for threes on what…