In six games coming off the bench for the Warriors, Klay Thompson is averaging 19.2 points a game with a 62.4 true shooting percentage and he’s hitting 44.1% from 3 — all numbers that are up from the 49 games he started before that. He’s doing all that in three fewer minutes a game, too.
Klay Thompson is thriving in his bench role — and the Warriors are 5-1 in those six games — but that doesn’t mean he handled it well when first told what was happening. Kendra Andrews of ESPN did a deep dive into Thompson’s sixth-man role and had this from Steve Kerr.
Thompson initially didn’t take the news well. Kerr told ESPN that Thompson yelled at him and some of the assistants. Later, he came back to apologize to the coaches.
“It was not an easy conversation,” Kerr said. “This is maybe the hardest part about getting further away from our prime. It’s just, after 12 years [of Thompson starting], it wasn’t easy. And still moving forward, it’s not going to be easy. But I told him, ‘If you really embrace it, you can help your team win.’”
You can’t fault a competitor for reacting that way. Kerr and Thompsons said it was a wise decision to make the move just before the All-Star break, which gave Thompson time to process the change and come at it with a better attitude (although he scored 35 points in that first game off the bench, so he handled it well that night, too).
We’ve had a front-row seat this season to watching Thompson deal with his basketball mortality. He is a future Hall of Fame player and part of one of the NBA’s great dynasty teams, but few players get to wind down their careers on their own terms. Few get the John Elway exit. Thompson and the Warriors as a whole are dealing with that as their dynasty era sunsets — it took Kerr a long time to come around on starting Jonathan Kuminga and Brandin Podziemski, giving this roster what it needed to have a chance at a run this season. It’s not easy to accept that we’re not what we once were and things have changed both with us and around us. Golden State has struggled with that top to bottom.
Fortunately for Thompson, he seems to have found his lane and is thriving now. He and Chris Paul off the bench dramatically change the non-Stephen Curry minutes for the Warriors, and that’s one thing that gives them a chance when the postseason comes.
