A brief obituary for Andre Iguodala's career
Andre Iguodala's fractured wrist marks the likely end of his brilliant career. Let us appreciate him and what he meant to this Warriors' team.
On the day that the Warriors shocked the world and signed Andre Iguodala to a four-year deal, July 5, 2013, I spent most of the day bumming around San Francisco waiting for a conclusion to Dwight Howard’s free agency. For those of you that don’t remember, Howard, who was at that point in time, one of the league’s marquee bigs, took a meeting with the Warriors on the 1st of July. Marcus Thompson, who now works for The Athletic, reported at the time that a sign-and-trade deal involving Andrew Bogut and one of Klay Thompson or Harrison Barnes was one potential avenue to Howard joining the Warriors.
Iguodala’s free agency saga is the stuff of legend and his agreement with the Warriors was a shock. Before the news broke, no media reports had connected him to the Warriors at any point in the offseason. Per media reports, the Warriors’ brain trust came to their meeting with Andre armed with supplementary material, presentations, and video clips, and Iguodala told them there was no need — he wanted to be a Warrior and now it was on them to make it happen. Here’s The Denver Post on the Iguodala signing:
“Before we could say too much, he was telling us how much he admired our team, he admired our coach and our players,” Myers said. “We said, ‘Do we have to sell you on anything?'” He said, ‘Look, I feel like this is the place I want to play.’ That moment was a transformative moment for our franchise.”
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Iguodala said he wanted to come to the Bay Area because he can connect with the franchise’s vision. He got a glimpse of that last season when the Warriors knocked out his Denver team in the first round of the playoffs.
The experience left Iguodala wanting to play with “smart big men” such as Andrew Bogut and David Lee, promising rookie Harrison Barnes and sharpshooters Klay Thompson and Stephen Curry, whom he jokingly said is “like the second coming of Jesus Christ. He’s like the most loved man on earth right now.”
“I think they were missing one piece,” Iguodala said. “And hopefully I can be that piece to get that team to where we all want to be, which is to try and win a championship.”
Bob Myers told reporters that he slept very little in the following days trying to find a way to offload the money they needed to sign Iguodala. When Myers finally had a deal lined up that required sending the maximum allowable amount of cash to the Utah Jazz on top of first-round pick compensation, he couldn’t get a hold of Warriors’ owner Joe Lacob, who was cavorting around a remote part of Montana without cell phone reception. Myers, in a panic, managed to get a hold of one of Lacob’s sons who told him to do the deal and that father Lacob would be fine with it.
The news of the Iguodala deal broke before Howard’s agreement with the Houston Rockets was announced. But for a few hours, speculation persisted that the aforementioned sign-and-trade deal for Dwight was still a possibility. In the end, the Warriors didn’t need Iguodala and Dwight Howard to turn them into championship contenders. Adding Dwight to the Warriors at the expense of Bogut and one of Thompson or Barnes — most likely Thompson — means the Warriors never become The Warriors. Dwight Howard and his well-documented affinity for posting up instead of rolling to the hoop would have clashed in an ugly way with David Lee’s pick-and-roll game while an increasingly gunshy Iguodala would have exacerbated these spacing issues. And what becomes of Draymond Green? You get the picture.
All the Warriors needed to compete for a championship was some growth from their young core, luck, and Iguodala and other wing players in his mold — selfless, smart, and long. In Iguodala’s first season with the Warriors, he changed his game. In Philadelphia, where Andre started his career, he was miscast as the protege to Allen Iverson and was asked to be a high-volume scoring guard. After failing to meet the expectations placed upon him by Philadelphia fans, he was traded to the Denver Nuggets where he slotted into a more complementary role and helped bring their defense up to snuff en route to a 57-25 record after finishing 38-28 the season prior.
But as a Warrior, Andre was more passive than ever. This seemed, to box-score watchers, a change for the worst. Iguodala’s scoring average dropped into single digits for the first time in his career in the 2013-14 season — it would decline for the rest of his career in all but one season — and his shot attempts per game also dropped into the single digits. But in a reduced shot-making role that was better suited to Iguodala’s desire to play The Right Way, his on-court impact was off the charts and the Warriors were a dominant +17.1 points per 100 possessions better with Iguodala on the court in the 2013-14 season.
Per Cleaning the Glass Andre’s on-court impact this season, before his body gave out on him again, was nearly as impressive as his 13-14 impact. In a small sample size, the Warriors were +15.4 points per 100 possessions better with a 39-year-old Iguodala on the court despite his advanced age. That Iguodala was still this good at making things gel on the court shouldn’t be that surprising. So long as his body has been right, Iguodala has been smart enough to make an impact. Here’s Andre post-game last year after telling a reporter he couldn’t sit down from the pain pain he felt in his body:
I think I said this before, the games have been dumbed down so much that a lower percentage of me is still I guess pretty good in today’s game.”
What I would do for the Warriors to have a younger version of Iguodala on this roster. For the glory years of the Dynasty, Iguodala was Steve Kerr’s security blanket, the one player who always knew exactly what the Warriors needed from him at any given moment. Iguodala operated as a point forward in bench units, he organized the Warriors’ offense and let Steph Curry and Klay Thompson roam off-ball, put out fires on defense, and most legendarily, played the role of defensive stopper against the NBA’s premier wings and guards in the playoffs.
Iguodala’s crowning moment of his career was the 2015 NBA Finals where he got thrust into the starting lineup, hit open shots created by the gravity of Steph Curry, and held LeBron James to 35.1% from the field when he defended him. For his efforts — and because Steph Curry had the misfortune of shooting poorly in Game 2 of the series — Iguodala received the 2015 NBA Finals MVP. This was the cherry on top of a season marked by him acquiescing, reluctantly at first, to a sixth-man role in order to accommodate Harrison Barnes.
In the years that followed the 2015 Finals, Iguodala was the perfect role player. He was an instrumental part of Death Lineups 1.0 and 2.0, he frustrated premier ball-handlers like James Harden, Kevin Durant, and Russell Westbrook in high-leverage moments, and he had a propensity for hitting big shots when the Warriors needed it most. Lost in the tragedy that was Game 6 of the 2019 Finals: Andre Iguodala was the second-leading scorer for the Warriors with 22 points, outscored Steph Curry, and hit the same amount of threes as him.
The fallout from the 2019 Finals was brutal. With Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant injured in catastrophic fashion and the latter on his way out of town, Iguodala was the necessary sacrifice for the Warriors’ audacious asset play that eventually became Andrew Wiggins and Jonathan Kuminga. Iguodala, ever the knowledgable and cynical professional, expected that he might be traded to clear money for the Warriors’ salary cap machinations and told Bob Myers there were no hard feelings when his trade to the Memphis Grizzlies was announced.
Although the Warriors knew that trading Iguodala was a necessary evil, it was not a move that felt good. Here’s Steve Kerr on Iguodala’s departure:
"I think when we lost him, we lost a piece of our soul. And we knew that when we lost him. But for the long-term health of the franchise, we made the decision to create an asset that would not have been there for us otherwise.
In a pleasant twist, Iguodala never played a game for the Memphis Grizzlies, who, with the benefit of hindsight, very clearly would have benefited from his veteran presence. Instead, Iguodala got traded to the Miami Heat midseason in 2020 and got bashed by the most odious and unsportsmanlike of the Grizzlies’ players before the trade was completed. Iguodala’s new team proceeded to make the NBA Finals, marking 6 straight appearances for him.
In Andre’s telling, he expected he’d always come back to the Warriors, and after one last season with the Heat, Iguodala signed a minimum deal with the Warriors, announced in typical Andre fashion, in The New York Times with the reporter of his choice. Here’s Andre in his own words:
“Who would have thought I’d have the opportunity to go back to the place where I was able to have, whatever you want to call it, legacy years, in terms of the accomplishments, winning multiple championships, the relationships that I was able to build with some of my closest friends and teammates?” Iguodala said, adding: “The relationship with the fans, the relationship with the Bay, the opportunity to end it here, was just something special.”
The Warriors raced to an 18-2 record to start the season and Iguodala was an instrumental part of Steve Kerr’s vet-heavy rotation that brought the Warriors some leeway when they stumbled midseason without Draymond Green and Steph Curry for extended stretches. It was as if little time had passed — Iguodala was one of the first Warriors off of the bench and figured prominently in some of the best’ Warriors’ lineup combos that bridged the gaps between the starters and bench players:
Curry/GPII/Iguodala/OPJ/Bjelica: +35.0 net rating in 70 possessions
Curry/Iguodala/Bjelica: +26.4 net rating in 151 minutes
GPII/Iguodala/Bjelica: +17.4 net rating in 149 minutes
Curry/Lee/Iguodala: +16.8 net rating in 130 minutes
Curry/Iguodala: +19.7 net rating in 323 minutes
Every few games, Iguodala would soar for a dunk that recalled the halcyon days of his hyperathletic youth. But those moments were few and far in between. The moments that stood out were the ones that highlighted his brilliance and on-court awareness. Here are a few examples from the 2021-22 season:
Eventually, Andre’s body gave out on him and his injury problems occurred around the same time that Draymond Green’s herniated disc forced an extended absence. Predictably, the Warriors’ defense suffered greatly during this period. When Iguodala did come back, he did his best but was unable to recapture the magic of the early season and was middling at best in the playoffs.
Seven years after winning his Finals MVP, Iguodala played in what was almost certainly his last NBA Finals. Iguodala was pretty ineffective in Game 1 of the 2022 Finals and it wasn’t until the waning moments of Game 6, with victory all but assured, that Iguodala came onto the floor again.
That symbolic moment would have been a great coda to a legendary career, but Iguodala decided to come back for one Last Dance, and the Warriors, knowing fully well the spiritual value of Iguodala, welcome him back with open arms. Iguodala’s off-court value, especially on a team that opened the season with six players under the age of 25, is without dispute. But in a cruel twist of fate and arrogant roster construction, Iguodala became necessary in a short period of time for this young and small Warriors’ team: per Cleaning the Glass, Iguodala had a +16.1 net rating in his 242 non-garbage time possession this season. If this is indeed the end of Andre Iguodala’s career, what an unfair end it is. Andre deserved better than to end his career on a fractured wrist but uh... this Warriors team could really use Andre.
It’s increasingly rare nowadays that NBA players stay in the league into their late 30s, but Andre, by virtue of his genius and leftover athletic ability, was genuinely useful. That he could be this impactful so late into his career is a testament to Andre and to the brilliant highs he reached in his Warriors’ career. Andre might not end up in the Basketball Hall of Fame, but his jersey will certainly end up in the rafters of the Chase Center and we were blessed to watch Iguodala grow and put his imprint on a team for the ages.