Kurtenbach: Klay Thompson is gone and the Warriors’ situation has gone from bad to worse
Klay Thompson is leaving for Dallas. He leaves behind serious wreckage in Golden State.
Klay Thompson didn’t care about his legacy when he left the Warriors on Monday, signing a three-year, $50 million deal with the Dallas Mavericks via a forced sign-and-trade.
So why should we spend this strange, end-of-an-era moment waxing poetic about the past and all the good times Thompson provided in the Bay?
Save that stuff for the jersey retirement ceremony. No, I, like Thompson, will take this moment to look into the future.
Though I imagine the four-time champion took one last look back at the flaming wreckage he helped create in San Francisco.
It wasn’t that long ago when the “lightyears ahead” Warriors wanted to be the next iteration of Spurs — good for two-plus decades. To do that, they’d have “two timelines” that would allow them to win now and win later.
That plan never panned out.
And now they’re left with no timelines.
No matter what you thought about Thompson’s efficacy last season, the Warriors letting him walk out the door for only a traded player exception (worth roughly $16 million) and two second-round draft picks is roster malpractice.
Mike Dunleavy Jr. was hired as the Warriors’ general manager on June 16, 2023. That was nearly a year to the day the Warriors won the 2022 NBA title.
Dunleavy inherited some problems, no doubt, but in the 382 days since he took over, he turned Thompson, Jordan Poole, and a first-round pick into nothing more than a steaming pile of funny money.
In short, he has ensured the Warriors won’t win another title with Steph Curry leading the way.
Is it all Dunleavy’s fault? Hardly. The inscrutable Thompson turned down a fair contract extension offer from the Warriors before the start of last season, opting instead to bet on himself.
Thompson lost that bet — his new deal is an annual pay cut of nearly $10 million from the Warriors’ extension offer. But instead of admitting that, he opted to pretend he won.
But Dunleavy hasn’t shown the negotiating chops or the roster-building creativity this precarious moment has demanded.
Instead, he helped drive the team off the cliff. In a job that demanded the stacking of wins, even small ones, amid roster arbitrage, Dunleavy came up woefully short move after move.
Coming into this offseason, the writing was on the wall: someone was going. The NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement made the Warriors’ previous spending habits far too onerous to maintain.
For Dunleavy, the choice was simple: can lose Thompson or you can waive Paul.
As disappointing as both of them were last season, the Warriors couldn’t lose both for nothing and maintain whatever competitiveness they had.
And yet that’s exactly what happened.
So I hope everyone enjoyed last season’s 46 wins and embarrassing play-in tournament exit to the Kings — that’s likely as good as things will be for a while yet.
The Warriors’ current roster leaves the team in basketball purgatory for at least the next season, if not longer.
This team is not good enough to make the final two seasons of Curry’s contract anything close to title-worthy. It also lacks a clear route to reasonably improve.
This point was made even more clear by the fact that the Warriors have already agreed to use one of the team’s few mechanisms for improvement, the non-taxpayer mid-level exception, on former 76er and Grizzly De’Anthony Melton.
The guard is a solid defensive option, averaging three deflections a game last season. He can shoot the 3-pointer, too. But he’s coming off a spinal injury that forced him to miss more than half of last season and he was one of the NBA’s worst shooters inside the 3-point arc (42.5 percent on 2s, sixth-worst in the league.)
A nice player, but hardly a difference-maker.
And that’s what the Warriors were able to hit with their heavy artillery.
The trade exception from the Thompson transaction can only be used to acquire someone on a salary dump — someone who makes up to or less than $16 million. There are a few options, but not one of them changes the calculus for Golden State.
Then there’s a $4.7 million bi-annual exception. That could bring in a player for something a bit more than the league’s veteran minimum.
How does any of this replace Thompson’s 18 points per game and 38.7 percent 3-point shooting?
It barely covers the 9 points and 7 assists per game Paul averaged last season.
The situation is dire.
But hey, maybe this team can trade Andrew Wiggins!
(Update: no one wants to trade anything worthwhile for Wiggins )
Of course, Warriors fans see this disaster and are already calling for the Warriors to cash in all their upcoming draft picks to trade for another “star” player with the goal of maximizing the next two years for Curry.
Frankly, that’s the last thing the Warriors should do now.
The Warriors are trending down — that’s been the case since the title in 2022 — but unless Jonathan Kuminga turns into an All-Star player (I’m not holding my breath), a full-on bottoming out seems inevitable once Curry’s contract expires at the end of the 2025-26 season.
When that time comes, boy, you are going to want those draft picks. They’re the only route back to winning.
And seeing as it cost six first-round picks (in effect) for the Knicks to trade for Mikal Bridges (a wonderful player who, it should be noted has never been to an All-Star Game), going “all-in” for the next two years would be equivalent paying off the high-interest-rate mortgage with a credit card.
Yes, bad became worse in the course of a few days.
It’s going to be difficult for anyone — much less Dunleavy, who has shown no acuity for the role he’s in — to pull the Dubs out of this hole.
And while Warriors CEO Joe Lacob’s checkbook won’t be as pressed in the upcoming season, his team will be hard-pressed to even match last season’s disappointment in an ever-improving Western Conference.
I’ve long wondered if you could put a price on respectability.
With the Warriors, we found out the answer this summer.