On Friday night, the Golden State Warriors overcame a double-digit deficit in a 2025 NBA Cup game to topple the San Antonio Spurs, 109–108. With the Warriors dropping their first NBA Cup contest, it was essentially a must-win scenario for the team to have hopes of advancing in the league’s in-season tournament, especially since San Antonio started off the NBA Cup 1–0.
However, the biggest takeaway from the game wasn’t Golden State’s comeback, but rather the brilliance of Stephen Curry. He dropped 49 points on the Spurs, including knocking down 9 of 17 three-point attempts, to lead a struggling squad that had just one other player—Jimmy Butler (21)—score more than 10 points.
That performance came just two days after Curry had 46 points in another victory over the Spurs, this one with a score of 125–120. With these kinds of outings, it’s easy to forget that Curry will turn 38 years old in just four months as he’s the eighth-oldest player to appear in an NBA game this season. Dropping back-to-back games with 45-plus points is an amazing accomplishment for a player of any age, but Curry doing so as one of the league’s elder statesmen is historic.
With Friday’s performance, Curry joined Michael Jordan as the only players in NBA history to have back-to-back games with 45-plus points at 35 years old or older. Jordan’s pair of games occurred not with the Chicago Bulls, who he turned 35 with during his final season with the team in 1997–98, but rather during his stint with the Washington Wizards.
During Jordan’s first year in D.C. in 2001–02, he followed up scoring a career-low of 6 points with then scoring 51 points in his next game and then 45 points in the one following that. Jordan was 38 years old when he pulled off the feat.
But wait, there’s more!
Curry, apparently, wasn’t content with matching just one of Jordan’s scoring records—he also matched another in Friday’s win. It was Curry’s 44th career game with at least 40 points since he turned 30 years old back in 2018. That matched another all-time NBA record, also held by Jordan, for the most 40-point games after turning 30 years old.
Curry, ever the historian of the game, was aware that this record was within his sights during the game and gestured when he reached the rarefied air of matching His Airness. When Curry hit a fourth quarter three-pointer to reach the 40-point threshold, he put up a “2” and “3” with his fingers while running back on defense, which was an ode to No. 23 himself, Jordan.
After Friday’s game, Curry was asked by the media if he was aware of sharing an NBA record with the player many consider the greatest player of all time.
Warriors coach Steve Kerr has seen firsthand the greatness of both Jordan and Curry. He won three NBA championships alongside the former with the Chicago Bulls and has coached Curry to four titles in the Bay Area. Curry mentioned that Kerr brought up his time with the Bulls during a morning shoot around earlier on Friday.
If anyone is the lead singer of the Golden State Warriors Band, it’s certainly Curry, just as Jordan was undoubtedly the frontman of the Chicago Bulls dynasty.
Besides sharing this NBA record—for now, at least until Curry has another such outing—he and Jordan also share North Carolina ties. While Jordan was born in Brooklyn, New York, and Curry was born in Akron, Ohio, both legends moved to North Carolina as youths and were raised there. Jordan grew up in Wilmington before starring at the University of North Carolina, while Curry was raised in Charlotte before bursting onto the national radar while at Davidson College in Greater Charlotte.
A mark of Jordan’s that Curry would certainly like to best one day is the six NBA championships. Curry has four, and it appears to be an uphill battle to get to five. With the back-to-back wins over San Antonio, Golden State is 8–6 after 14 games. That has it in the eighth spot in the Western Conference standings, and of Curry’s four previous title-winning teams, they all had at least 11 wins after the 14-game mark.
