Steph Curry's trainer offers more insight about leg injury

The Warriors are back to playing the waiting game.

For the second time this season, superstar Steph Curry is expected to miss a few weeks due to injury. He had to exit late in the third quarter of Saturday's contest against the Dallas Mavericks after McKinley Wright IV banged into his left knee while driving to the hoop.

Curry's longtime personal trainer Brandon Payne joined 95.7 The Game's "Steiny & Guru" on Monday to give some more insight into Steph's recovery and what comes next. The Warriors will be aided by the nine-day layoff of the All-Star break in mid-February, but they will play 12 games over the next calendar month. Payne said he has no concerns that it will be a season-ending injury for Curry.

"That hasn't come up," Payne told hosts Matt Steinmetz and Daryle ‘The Guru’ Johnson. "He would have certainly conveyed that to me if he thought that was the case. Same thing if you listen to coach (Steve) Kerr (Sunday), I think he said the same thing. Initially, I think with the pain he felt, he thought that could be the case. But he is relieved that is not the case, he is just gonna miss a little bit of time and he’ll be back out there, as soon as he possibly can be. I don't have any fear that it will be a season-ending thing. Not at all."

Here's the play where Steph Curry appeared to injure his leg pic.twitter.com/s7R85uI1KE

Technically, the Warriors said an MRI revealed Curry, "suffered partial tears to his superior tibiofibular ligaments and interosseous membrane as well as a contusion to his lower leg."

A lot of people were caught off-guard by the technical analysis, but Payne said Curry is optimistic about the big picture.

"Structurally, everything was sound," Payne said. "That's the one thing Steph told me the other night when we spoke, was he felt the knee was sound. There was no looseness. If you had a major ligament (injury) there – whether it's your ACL, MCL, meniscus, something like that – there would be some instability there that you could feel there just with a manual test. So that wasn't there. It's not necessarily a stability injury, it's a pain tolerance-type injury. … It's gonna take some time to get through that initial wave of pain."

Payne said the setback is similar to the injury Curry suffered in 2018, when Warriors big man JaVale McGee rolled on his left knee and he sprained his MCL. In that case, Curry was sidelined for five weeks before returning to the Warriors.

"The fact that we’ve been through this process multiple times (helps)," Payne said. "There is a skill to being injured. There's a process to being injured. What I mean by that, when I say, ‘There's a skill to being injured,’ is that there's a way you have to be able to communicate with the team around you, with me, with your doctors, with your trainers at the Warriors, there's a way you have to be able to communicate exactly what's going on with your body. The more effectively you can communicate those things, the more effectively the treatment that you’re getting will be. Steph, he's in touch with his body probably better than any other pro or anybody I’ve ever been around."