De’Anthony Melton could be fully unleashed soon, says Steve Kerr

De’Anthony Melton was expected to play a big role for the Golden State Warriors when he signed with them in the summer of 2024. But just six games into his Warriors stint, Melton suffered a torn left ACL on November 12, 2024 and was out for the remainder of the 2024-25 season.

He was expected to be a strong backcourt complement to Stephen Curry, but the ACL injury forced the Warriors to explore other options for retooling their roster. But Melton returned to the Warriors in the summer of 2025, signing a two-year deal $6.53 million deal to try and finish what he started the year prior.

De’Anthony Melton missed the first 22 games of the season for the Warriors as he continued to rehab from the torn ACL, but finally made his season debut on December 4th against his former team in the Philadelphia 76ers. In 21 minutes of play, Melton recorded 14 points, three assists, and two steals.

Melton has quietly been trending upwards as the season has gone on. Since the calendar flipped to 2026, Melton has averaged 15 points, 3.2 rebounds, 2.5 assists, and 1.6 steals per game while shooting 45.4 percent from the field and 33.1 percent from three.

His best game of the season actually came this past week, when he scored a season-high 28 points, grabbed four rebounds, and dished out four assists in a season-high 28 minutes and 11 seconds of action.

The one thing Melton still hasn’t done yet is play back-to-back sets, a common things for players to not do in their first year coming back from a serious injury.

According to Warriors head coach Steve Kerr, however, there’s a chance that De’Anthony Melton could be cleared to play in both halves of back-to-back sets at some point this season. In speaking with Bay Area radio hosts Willard and Dibs, Kerr said that Melton recently had his minutes restriction increased and could play in back-to-backs.

“There is a chance, but it’s not something that I know I can pinpoint when, but he is heading in a good direction,” Kerr said. “And we bumped his minutes restriction up so he’s playing more minutes in individual games and the next step hopefully is that he’ll play in back-to-backs, but I can’t tell you exactly when that is. That’ll be up to the training staff.”

On the show, Steve Kerr also made the revelation that Kristaps Porzingis is not presently dealing with POTS after reports that the illness had been affecting the center since his Boston Celtics days.

“When I heard about the trade, I read about his POTS diagnosis and then called Onsi Saleh, who was with us, he’s now Atlanta’s GM and he’s a good friend of mine,” Kerr explained. “I called him and I said, ‘is this POTS story real?’ And he said it’s actually not POTS. It was not POTS.’ So that was some misinformation that was out there.

“I don’t know if anybody’s asked him about it, but bottom line is whatever was bothering him in Atlanta that was keeping him out had nothing to do with the illness last week. He was just sick. There’s a lot going around as you guys know and he was sick enough where he was losing a lot of fluid and contagious so we just kept him home, but he’s doing a lot better now.”

The Golden State Warriors return home for a matchup against their division rival Los Angeles Lakers on Saturday night, one in which De’Anthony Melton is not listed on the injury report for. Kristaps Porzingis, who has played just one game with the Warriors since being traded from the Atlanta Hawks, is listed as questionable to play.

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