This is the problem with getting out the gate slowly, even if you're a championship horse. You're biding your time before you kick into high gear, but then something goes wrong somewhere around the first turn, and suddenly, as the great Yogi Berra once said, it starts getting late early. 

That's the Golden State Warriors right now. At 14-15 and currently clinging to the Western Conference's last play-in spot, everyone thought they had plenty of time to get on a roll and start climbing the standings. But now Stephen Curry is reportedly out for at least two weeks, with Shams Charania reporting it is expected to be closer to a month before he returns, with a left shoulder subluxation, which is a fancy way of saying a partial dislocation. 

There's no way to sugarcoat this: The Warriors are a mess without Curry. They always have been, really. Even when Kevin Durant was around. Since the star of the 2019-20 season, they are 24-66 without him. This season, they are scoring just 103 points per 100 possessions when Curry sits, which would register as the worst offensive rating in the league by a mile, per Cleaning the Glass. 

By contrast, when Curry is on the court, the Warriors are scoring over 120 points per 100, which would be the league's top rating, per CTG. In other words, the difference between Curry on and off the court is the NBA's best and worst offense. Getting by with the latter for potentially the next month is going to be an extremely challenging, if not impossible, undertaking. 

In the short term, the Warriors have to finish out their current road trip, which includes four more games all against good teams: the Sixers, Raptors, Knicks and Nets. The Warriors are 2-13 on the road so far. At 1-11, only the Magic own a worse road record. 

So right away, if something doesn't change, the Warriors could very well be something like 15-18 or even 14-19 heading back home, where they will then face the Grizzlies, the West's current No. 2 seed, on Christmas. After that, Golden State has dates with Utah, Portland, Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix. 

This is not an easy stretch, even if everyone else stays healthy and Klay Thompson gets green lit for the three back-to-backs over this stretch. Depth and bench play has been a major problem for Golden State all season. One more injury, and things get really bleak. 

Not to go all doomsday here, but if the Warriors pull into mid-January six or seven games under .500, or worse, their margin for error is going to turn razor thin in an obviously deep Western Conference. The good news, even at 14-15, is they are only three losses out of a top-four seed at the moment. Things are tightly packed. So, in that sense, there's a scenario where the Warriors come out of Curry's absence not that much worse than where they are now. 

But, again, they are a downright bad team without Curry. Jordan Poole is now the only realistic playmaker and he's going to have to play huge, but that strips the second unit of its lone playmaker. Andrew Wiggins, who has been cleared to return to practice after missing the last five games with an adductor injury, needs to get back ASAP. Curry has been the best fourth-quarter scorer in the league. Who's going to get buckets down the stretch should the Warriors even find a way to keep some of these games close?

Indeed, questions abound. It's not quite panic time for the Warriors, but it's getting close. Not much else can go wrong. This is what happens when you put yourself in a hole in the first place.