What we learned as Steph Curry’s 26 leads Warriors past Hornets in hometown win originally appeared on NBC Sports Bay Area
Scoreboards aren’t always a beauty pageant.
The Warriors, to close out 2025, still gave away far too many turnovers that were accompanied by perplexing decisions on Wednesday. They also let it fly from deep and found a way to end the year winning five of their last six games after beating the Charlotte Hornets 132-125 at the Spectrum Center.
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Hometown hero Steph Curry scored a team-high 26 points on 9-of-16 shooting and went 5 of 10 behind the 3-point line. Curry now has 400 career games of making at least five 3-pointers.
Draymond Green dished a season-high 12 assists, showcasing his chemistry alongside Curry all game. He was a game-high plus-18, also adding 10 points and eight rebounds. To round out the Big Three, Jimmy Butler scored 19 points, going 11 of 12 from the free-throw line, and also had five rebounds and seven assists to stuff the stat sheet.
Led by Brandin Podziemski (19 points) and Gui Santos (13 points), the Warriors’ bench shone again to outscore the Hornets’ reserves 61-29.
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Each team scored with ease. The Warriors shot 55.4 percent from the field, 49 percent from three and 94.1 percent at the free-throw line. On the other side, the Hornets shot 51.6 percent from the field, 40 percent from three and went 13 of 17 on free throws (76.5 percent).
However, the Warriors had a 24-point advantage from downtown, and six players made multiple threes.
Here are three takeaways from the Warriors’ win that pushes their record to 18-16 entering 2026.
Curry’s Charlotte Homecoming
With his father, Dell, on the broadcast, all that was missing from a full family affair was a healthy Seth Curry. The younger of the Curry brothers remains sidelined due to sciatic-nerve issue related to his pelvis and lower back. But the elder still was ready to give his hometown fans plenty to cheer about.
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Curry missed a layup and three to begin the game before draining a triple from the right wing. While being hugged and hounded wherever he went, the theatrics started to show up in the second quarter. Cheers echoed while Curry dropped 12 points and made three 3-pointers in the second quarter.
The strategy of holding onto Curry for dear life worked for stretches and even had him showing some frustrations. Before Wednesday, Curry was averaging 27.3 points per game in Charlotte, falling just short of the mark in Year 17.
He and Dell, in an early New Year’s Eve game, tied Dolph and Danny Schayes for the most combined games played by a father-son duo in NBA history with 2,134. They’ll stand alone when the Warriors play the Oklahoma City Thunder on Friday for their first game of 2026.
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Three Santos
It could be four minutes, eight minutes or more. Steve Kerr knows what he’s getting from Santos.
The Brazilian always brings energy on both sides of the ball. When he’s hitting outside shots, the Warriors reap the benefits of a cherry on top. That hasn’t happened often this season. But it sure did in Charlotte.
Santos came into the day shooting a career-low 30.8 percent from three. That didn’t stop him from taking advantage of wide-open space, going a perfect 4 of 4 from the field and 3 of 3 on threes in the first half for 11 points.
“I jumped, I didn’t see anybody to pass to, but I’m glad Will showed up. I hit him, he hit me right back and I was wide open. I got to shoot that. I shot three shots, I had made all three, so I said, ‘Ahh, I gotta shoot that one too,’” Santos said to Bob Fitzgerald and Kelenna Azubuike at halftime while talking about his third three.
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Yet as the Warriors watched their lead vanish in the third quarter, Santos was watching from the bench. Once he came in, he immediately grabbed a huge offensive rebound that led to two free throws for Butler. Those are the kind of intangibles that led to Santos being a plus-15 in 17 minutes off the bench with 13 points, five rebounds and two assists.
Wake-Up Call
Breakfast with a side of basketball was an odd feeling on Wednesday morning. The Warriors clearly still were waking up and in need of Butler’s BIGFACE Coffee at the start of the game against an 11-win Hornets team. They were all tied up at 30 points apiece after the first quarter, mostly because of six Warriors turnovers that became 10 Hornets points.
A few minutes into the second quarter, the Warriors had one of their more low-IQ sequences of the season. Following a turnover by Green where he dribbled the ball off his foot, there was a shot-clock malfunction where Moussa Diabate caught a Brandon Miller airball, but the clock reset. Refs corrected the mistake, giving the Hornets the ball out of bounds with 1.8 seconds, just for the Warriors to commit two terrible fouls – first from Gary Payton II and then Moses Moody on a Sion James 3-point attempt, to which he made two free throws.
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As the Warriors went into halftime with a five-point lead behind hot shooting, they already committed 11 turnovers for 19 Hornets points. Their tendency to foul also led to the Hornets taking six more free throws than them in the first half. The Warriors started the third quarter strong, but once they held a 15-point lead, 79-64, the Hornets outscored them 36-19 the rest of the quarter to go up by two at the start of the fourth.
Giving the Hornets 28 points off 19 turnovers won’t work against better teams, which the Warriors have seen time and time again. Starting Friday, they don’t leave California until Jan. 22, giving the Warriors a stretch of games to build some real momentum.
