Steph Curry has had a busy summer. First, his Warriors won their third NBA championship in four years. Then, he and his wife, Ayesha, welcomed their third child to their family. And just last weekend, he competed on the Web.com pro golf tour and stunned everyone with an opening round of 71. This week, he joined The Bill Simmons Podcast to discuss adding Boogie to the Warriors, following NBA beefs on Twitter, and watching Draymond Green vs. Steve Kerr arguments in practice.
Listen to the full podcast here. This transcript has been edited and condensed.
What DeMarcus Cousins’s Role Will Be With the Warriors
Bill Simmons: It’s funny because with teams, they’ll always be like, “Oh, that guy, he’s everybody’s favorite teammate.” There will always be multiple choices. And with Klay [Thompson], it just seems like he’s everybody’s favorite teammate.
Steph Curry: 100 percent. Even DeMarcus [Cousins] said it in his press conference. He doesn’t even play with Klay, besides in the Olympics two years ago, but he’s like, “That’s my favorite guy already.” And he hasn’t spent a day in the Warriors locker room with us. But yeah, [Klay] has that presence that you need. He’s unique, for sure.
Simmons: You mean when you guys cheated and you got DeMarcus even though he’s coming off a major injury.
Curry: What are you talking about? What are you talking about? [Laughs]
Simmons: No, I’m kidding. I’m actually on your side on this. Everyone got so mad with the DeMarcus thing and it’s like the guy tore his Achilles last year. If he comes back in February, it’ll be like a bonus for you guys.
Curry: I think all the way through, just the benefit of being on our team, obviously for him, is there’s no rush for him to come back. He can really take his time and get right. But, when I look at just the opportunity that comes past January, February, whenever he comes back, to the playoffs, it gives us a whole new dynamic. And whatever type of DeMarcus shows up—I know he expects to be back to fully 100 percent and we do too—[he] gives us a new dimension that we haven’t had before, a guy that can actually go get a bucket on the block. We can have guys, shooters around him.
Simmons: Get some boards.
Curry: He’s actually an amazing playmaker, and you’ve seen it in New Orleans. But when he gets the ball at the top of the key, he can break the bigs down and he’s a great passer. Coach Kerr loves great passing big men that can read the defense and make plays. So it’s going to be amazing, man. I’m excited about it. Obviously.
Simmons: That reminds me—now we can officially start thinking about your whole run versus the Bulls in the ’90s. Because you have three [championships], they had six. But there was one year they added Bison Dele in ’97, in like February. And they only had him for a couple months. But he gave them this whole new look that they didn’t have any of those other six years. And that’s what I thought you guys were missing last year. ... You go back to the ’60s with the Auerbach Celtics—they would add one guy every year. It was like, “Oh, the new guy! Oh, this guy really wants it.” You guys had that with David West.
Curry: And [you] keep everybody on edge because you had to figure it out, right? And I think that’s the benefit of this year.
Simmons: Yeah. You want the one guy who’s just dying to be on a good team and he can’t believe his good fortune. And you can kind of feed off of that a little bit.
Curry: 100 percent. And there’s going to be a feeling-out process, obviously. Because lineups will change a little bit. Rotations may change a little bit. But, I think just over the course of 82 games, and then we look at the playoffs, it gives us something to look forward to and something to really focus on—how we’re going to implement his skill set to what we do. Obviously, keeping our style of play, playing fast, using the guys that have been around these last three or four years, and figuring that out. But, it gives us something to look forward to. And I’m lucky to sit here in August, thinking about how we get back to June. There’s a lot of time in between and we’ve got to be ready.
On NBA Twitter
Simmons: Do you monitor what all these other teams are doing during the summer, or do you not care?
Curry: Oh yeah, I notice. I mean I’m checking my phone—especially when free agency happens—to see what’s going down.
Simmons: Like do you have [ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski]—is there a Twitter notification where if he has a bomb, it goes right to your phone?
Curry: No, only thing I appreciate about Woj was the draft-night shenanigans where he had to try to predict the picks before [they happened], but he couldn’t necessarily say what the—
Simmons: Oh, he had to dance around it?
Curry: “The Blanks are really keen on selecting like …” [Laughs] He had to figure out all these different adjectives. It was pretty clever. But nah, I stay in tune with what’s going on. You’ve got to know the lay of the land and kind of just get mentally prepared for what challenges teams might face or present coming into next season.
Simmons: Who’s on your radar? Do you want to call anyone out? Start some feuds? C.J. McCollum keeps throwing daggers.
Curry: Portland is a hot topic right now. C.J. and [Kevin Durant] had their thing, whatever. I take that as pure entertainment. NBA Twitter is unreal. Like it’s a thing—it’s a legit thing. And it’s really entertaining.
Simmons: It actually is amazing it’s not more frequent where guys just are going at each other. It’s so easy to just type a tweet and send it.
Curry: Ehh. I would argue it’s been very, very consistent. Throughout the course of the season, you got [Joel] Embiid’s stuff, you got Enes Kanter, you got all sorts of people just throwing shade back and forth.
Simmons: Embiid’s 10/10.
Curry: The NBA pettiness is at an all-time high and I am here for it.
Draymond Green vs. Steve Kerr
Simmons: What’s your favorite Draymond story? What’s the one story that captures what it’s like to be on the same team as Draymond Green? Other than the game where he almost got thrown out for trash-talking the Clippers when he wasn’t even in uniform. [Laughs]
Curry: [Laughs] I remember that game. Probably the times him and Coach Kerr get into it. And you’re inside of practice and you don’t know whose side to take. Just like, “I guess they’re both right, but they’re both wrong.”
Simmons: What do they argue about? Give me an example. Just where [Draymond] should go on a play?
Curry: They argue about a play call or maybe something Coach Kerr has been thinking about for a couple games. ... And [Draymond’s] like, “Don’t over-coach. We know what we doing.” And coach is like, “Well, I know you know what you’re doing, but let me just help you as I’m supposed to do. That’s what my job is, to point out things that could be important for us to win a championship.”
But they have a real—the respect level between those two is at an all-time high, but they have their moments and it’s just amazing entertainment to watch in practice. Coach’s first year, we were doing some five-on-five drill. It was early season, and Draymond loves talking trash to the whole team—doesn’t matter if it’s me. Shaun Livingston was posting me up on the block and I had no chance to try to contest his shot. And he did a little turnaround, a Shaun Livingston vintage turnaround.
Simmons: Yeah, old man game.
Curry: Draymond was like, “He’s too small, Dot! He’s too small, Dot! Baby food!” Yelling all that stuff in the middle of practice, and he’s on my team. [Laughs] I’m like, “Bro, come on.” That little stuff happens, but then when him and Coach Kerr get into it, the whole practice stops because they’re two important voices when it comes to how practice is flowing. So, we let them kind of deal with their issue and we keep it moving. At the end of practice, it’s just like nothing happened. And that’s the best part.
