In basketball, one elite player can change your fortunes massively, turning non-playoff teams into postseason-level squads and playoff-level teams into title contenders.As such, when you have an MVP-caliber player on your roster, it's very likely that your team, at worst, will be in the playoffs just about every year.That is not always the case, however, and the Golden State Warriors, led by two-time MVP winner Stephen Curry, are a prime example of that.After tonight's deflating defeat, one that left the Warriors out of the playoffs for the second time in the last three seasons, and the fourth time in the last seven, Curry made history, matching Moses Malone, Kevin Garnett and Derrick Rose as the MVP winners with the most times missing the playoffs on their resume, each boasting seven such campaigns. Rose arguably had the least impressive career, accolade-wise, of any MVP winner - due to injuries - but the other two are all-timers. (For this exercise, we're only counting seasons in which the player actually played, so, for example, when Rose missed an entire campaign due to injury, we didn't count that here.)Both Malone (19 NBA seasons) and Garnett (21) played longer than Curry (17) has thus far in his career.

Mathematically, Garnett missed the playoffs in 33.3 percent of his career seasons, and Malone in 36.8 percent. Curry is now at 41.2 percent of the years in his career ending without a playoff appearance, a somewhat jarring number considering the level of player he is in the all-time pantheon. (We have Curry as the 13th-greatest player of all-time.)Unfortunately for Warriors and Curry fans, this is a record that Davidson legend may very well hold outright at some point, because Golden State, with the way its roster is currently constructed, is far from a lock to make the playoffs any year going forward, not with an aging Draymond Green and a fresh-of-an-ACL-tear Jimmy Butler as Curry's main supporting cast.

Curry also doesn't seem like the type to hightail it and run in order to extend his championship window, though more surprising things have happened in free agency and on the trade market historically, so we suppose Curry doing that can't be totally ruled out.If Curry does decide to leave Golden State, it would be hard to blame him, as the front office has made a plethora of blunders that have the franchise where it's at now, missing the postseason twice in three years with a still-prime Curry on the roster. Drafting James Wiseman second overall in 2020, ahead of the likes of LaMelo Ball, Deni Avdija and Tyrese Haliburton immediately rings such a bell. (In fairness, Golden State would have been panned for taking Avdija or Haliburton that high in 2020, but even so, they would have helped the Warriors immensely over the past couple of seasons.) Either way, even if Curry does own that record outright at some point, he's still more successful than most other players in league history when it comes to team hardware.

After all, he's a four-time NBA champion, a one-time Finals MVP, as well as a championship runner-up twice. Six trips in the Finals in 10 playoff appearances is genuinely extremely impressive when you further factor in the fact that Curry did that out of a loaded Western Conference. It's just an interesting bit of league history that a player as successful as Curry has been could miss the playoffs so many times.This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Stephen Curry has now missed the playoffs for the seventh time. That's the most times ever by an MVP winner.