Warriors extend Steph Curry through 2027

The Warriors franchise player tacked on an extra year to his contract for $62.6 million, the most money and years the team could give him.

Steph Curry’s summer has been all about gold. First, he shot down France in the Olympic basketball final to win a gold medal. Now the Golden State Warriors are backing up the Brink’s truck to shower their franchise player with gold with a one-year, $62.6 million extension.

The new deal tacks on an extra year to Curry’s current contract and will keep him in a Warriors uniform past his 39th birthday. Because of the NBA’s “over-38 rule,” players can’t sign a deal longer than three years total if they turn 38 in the course of it, so this is the most years and most money the Warriors could give Curry.

That’s not age discrimination; just a mechanism to prevent teams circumventing the salary cap by adding unlikely years to a deal, like an NHL team in the 2010’s. Yes, LeBron James and Chris Paul helped push the old “over-36” rule to “over-38” when they were leaders of the players union.

Curry is getting older but is still one of the best players in the world at age 36. While James has switched teams three times and Paul is about to play for his seventh different team, Curry has remained with Golden State his whole career, and aside from one interview with Marc J. Spears this summer where he said he might have trouble playing on a “bottom feeder,” Curry’s never really hinted at leaving.

Will he be worth $62.6M two seasons from now? On the court, probably not, though the salary cap should be skyrocketing between now and then, thanks to the NBA’s new TV deal that’s worth $7 billion per season. That’s still a ton of money, but it’s less ridiculous considering the salary cap will be over $170 million by then.

Besides, shouldn’t Curry reap some of the benefits of that huge broadcasting windfall? There have been 27 NBA games with 14 million or more viewers since 2015, and Curry has played in all of them. Curry played in 32 of the 33 NBA telecasts with 13 million or more viewers, and Game 4 against the Sacramento Kings last April was the highest-rated first-round playoff game in 21 years — until Game 7 of that same series, which drew 2.3 million more viewers than Game 4.

It’s also compensation for the years where Curry was the NBA’s most underpaid superstar. In 2015-16, the second of Curry’s MVP seasons, 60 NBA players made more than him, including such luminaries as Amir Johnson, DeMarre Carroll, Nikola Pekovic, and Enes Freedom. The Baby-Faced Assassin was the fifth-highest-paid player on his own team, while the franchise was skyrocketing in value.

What does this mean for future roster-building? Curry’s deal now expires at the same time as Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins’ contracts, the same season new Warriors Kyle Anderson and Buddy Hield have their final, non-guaranteed years (ignoring Hield’s strange non-guaranteed player option for 2027-28, which seemed designed to let his agent claim he signed for $38M, even though he’s only guaranteed $21M). It’s also the last season for Brandin Podziemski and Trayce Jackson-Davis to be on ultra-cheap rookie deals, though presumably Jonathan Kuminga will be making big bucks if he’s still a Warriors.

Ultimately, this is a reward for the player who took the Warriors from laughing stock to juggernaut. While a 39-year-old Curry will have almost certainly lost a step, it’s hard to imagine he’ll be any less popular by then. He’ll sell tickets, he’ll sell jerseys, and he’ll probably be 1,000 three-pointers ahead of his closest competition in the record book.

Speaking of gold, at today’s market price, Curry’s deal for 2026-27 would be worth just under 1,700 pounds of gold. Since Curry says he weighs 200 pounds at this point in his career, he’s not only worth his weight in gold, he’s worth 8.5 times that.