SAN FRANCISCO — The joy with which Steph Curry plays and that has made him one of the game’s most infectious superstars has been missing lately, at least from his podium spot in the Bill King Interview Room.

After the Warriors were knocked out by the Kings on Sunday, Curry, with a stoic expression and a monotone voice, offered a blunt assessment of the 18-17 team for the second time this home game. In a 30-point, 22-turnover loss against a team that was missing its leading scorer and fired its head coach less than two weeks ago, “there was no hope on the horizon,” Curry said.

Even more telling, Curry acknowledged the reality of the current roster, which is hard to say about the nine previous iterations of his Warriors teams that have made it to the postseason, or especially the four that have hung banners at Chase Center .

“We’re not really set up to have that comeback,” Curry said.

That’s right. The game’s deadliest assassin from 3-point range, actually converting two four points His team felt that the 36-21 deficit at the end of the first quarter was too far out of reach. He was right. The Warriors ran from buzzer to buzzer.

The uncertainty or lack of offensive firepower is new territory for a team that, until this summer, featured a duo nicknamed the “Splash Bros.” With Curry and Klay Thompson, the Warriors never finished below eighth in offensive rating.

So far this season they have finished 18th out of 30 teams. The only worse offensive team to feature Curry in the Steve Kerr era was in 2020-21, when Thompson missed the entire season due to knee surgery and the team missed the postseason.

Curry’s trademark excitement has traditionally put any deficit within reach, and he unleashed a Sunday that cut the Kings’ lead from 15 points to four within 1:07 of the second quarter. By halftime he had scored 20 points. But the Warriors entered the locker room trailing by 24.

He spent the entire fourth quarter on the bench with a towel over his head.

“It’s just one of those things where you don’t want to be in a situation like that, especially in a back-to-back game where the guys just used a lot of energy last night to get the win,” Curry said, referring to Saturday’s 121-113 win against the Grizzlies, which he had to sit out. “I would have liked to have started the game much better to give ourselves a chance and not end up in the situation we found ourselves in, where you have to deliver crazy offensive fireworks to even have a chance of a comeback. That’s not our MO.”

Six days earlier, after a 113-95 loss to the Cavs, Curry said to similar effect: “I think we’re just average.”

Two months after his 37th birthday, in his 16th NBA season and suffering from tendonitis in both knees, Curry has a significant burden to shoulder. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that a month before the trade deadline, he’s becoming more vocal about the shortcomings of Mike Dunleavy Jr.’s assembled roster.

When the Heat visit Chase Center on Tuesday, they won’t have Jimmy Butler in tow. The short-tempered superstar was suspended by the team after demanding a trade, with the Warriors reportedly one of his preferred destinations. Meanwhile, other reports link Golden State to Bulls center Nikola Vucevic and Pacers forward Aaron Nesmith.

Kerr said he and the Warriors’ general manager planned to take a wait-and-see approach as they continued to evaluate their roster leading up to the Feb. 6 deadline, but that was before they learned they would likely be without Jonathan Kuminga for the duration would this time.