The Golden State Warriors 2021-22 season-in-review: Klay Thompson
Reliving Thompson's glorious return, his bonkers shot selection, his decreased shots at the rim, mapping out his future, and much more.
Klay Thompson: B+
Now over 1000 days removed from the ACL tear that upended his career, Klay Thompson is, again, a championship winner. The last pre-injury memory the world had of Klay was him at the peak of his powers. Klay was 29 years old when he tore his ACL and his Game 6 performance that night offered a tantalizing glimpse of an expanded on-ball repertoire that he should have spent his prime years improving. Instead, Klay Thompson spent two years rehabbing devastating lower body injuries and didn’t play again until the age of 31, the approximate end of most players’ athletic prime.
Klay Thompson’s 2021-22 season should be graded on a curve that acknowledges the limitations placed upon him by his ACL tear and subsequent Achilles tear. It was never fair to expect him to be Game 6 Klay ever again and yet, he did flash occasional glimpses of the highs of his younger self. What’s more impressive is that he managed to do so deep into the playoffs and with a supreme sense of the moment. Yes, Klay Thompson had lots of games littered with bad shots, but when it mattered most, he found a way to hit necessary shots and dig deep into his emotional and physical reserve to play tough defense.
It is nothing short of miraculous that Klay Thompson made meaningful contributions in a championship run. He is unlikely to ever be worth, in an objective sense, the max contract he signed in the summer of 2019. But after nearly 941 days of rehab and half a season of load management, Thompson averaged 20 points a game for his sixth consecutive season and played the most playoff minutes of any Warrior during a successful championship run. All things considered, that’s a huge victory.
After Thompson’s ACL injury in 2019, the people that knew him best worried about how he’d handle having basketball taken away from him. Numerous articles have been written about Klay’s love for basketball and how, pre-injury, his life, and identity were inextricably tied to the game — he would need to find new outlets. Here’s Zaza Pachulia on Klay, via ESPN:
"That's the exact conversation we had, […] What hobbies can you find? ... I want him to come back, I want him to -- commit [to rehab]. You have to commit. It's hard to commit if you're not enjoying your life and yourself. So obviously basketball is taken away, so what's next? How can we help Klay? He said, 'Let's try a boat. Let's do it.'"
Klay’s newfound affinity for the ocean has turned into the stuff of legends and Captain hat merchandising. But what’s more important is what it did for his mental health. After the Finals, Thompson said this about his appreciation for nature:
“It was tough during the initial stages because I was in a boot, I couldn't really take walks in the park, I couldn't jog. Now I can do those things. I can get outside, I can go to the park, I can bring a couple fishing lines to the ocean.
[...]
The beautiful part about being in nature, you realize how small you are in this world because there’s so much, so many big things around you, whether it’s the Redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, the night sky, the sunshine. There’s something about immersing yourself in nature that really resets my whole spirit. I really believe that.”
These new interests enriched Thompson’s life off the court but they didn’t prevent him from having doubts and questions about whether his return to basketball would even happen. About a month prior to his return, he let down his guard in a very public fashion, crying post-game on the Warriors’ bench at Chase Center in December. Steve Kerr told ESPN’s Zach Lowe this about that moment:
"At that point he was still kind of wondering, like, 'Is this ever gonna happen for me?' And everything that he had been through seemed to kind of come to a boiling point in, you know, for him emotionally, and he just, he just started crying."
In the days leading up to Thompson’s January 9th return against the Cleveland Cavaliers, he projected confidence about his return and told ESPN:
"I'm excited to get out there and prove to people who I am, [...] I know they forgot because I've been out for two years, but I've never been hungrier seeing that stuff. Never been hungrier. And the best way at revenge is to win. Seriously."
January 9, 2022, was one of the most exciting days of my entire Warriors fandom. I purchased an expensive bottle of mezcal in anticipation of Klay Thompson’s return and prepared myself to be reduced to tears. I know I was not alone in that feeling. In a break from the Warriors’ typical pre-game routine, Steph Curry was announced by Franco Finn second-to-last, and let Klay have a moment by himself on the bench as he waited for his name to be called for the starting lineup announcement for the first time in nearly three years.
Klay started the night in typical fashion and scored a bucket on his very first play, a designed pindown action that he used to curl off of a screen and drive to the hoop for a layup. You can see that play below.
The play that you probably remember most was the scariest one of the night, a moderately reckless and heart-stopping dunk off of the dribble against Jarrett Allen:
This dunk felt like Klay sending a message that he did not fear injury or believe that his body would fail him again. This dunk was one of the most iconic moments of Klay’s career, but it also scared the living shit out of me to see him come off of the rim off-balance and land chaotically on two feet.
But my favorite Klay moment on the night of his return was an unsung one that occurred late in the second quarter. On a routine staggered pick and roll for Steph Curry, Klay lingered by the left corner of the court and his defender, Cedi Osman, did not think to leave him for even a second. The result was an easy drive to the hoop made possible by the threat of Klay Thompson’s three-point shooting — a threat that could not be diminished by nearly three years away from the game.
Klay put up 18 shots in 20 minutes during his return. That high volume of shots per minute turned out to prophesy how Klay operated for much of the regular season As should be expected, Klay was quite often not fully himself for more than a game or a stretch of minutes at a time. For each moment of Klay hitting a dagger three in transition, there was another one of him taking ill-advised shots early in the clock or forcing movement threes that his body no longer seemed to cooperate with — observers like Anthony Slater and Marcus Thompson at The Athletic and Dunc’d On podcast host, Nate Duncan, noticed that this version of Klay had a tendency to drift on shots where his balance used to be better.
As expected, Klay’s body didn’t allow him to chase around small guards on-ball as often as he did during his prime. But against bigger ball-handlers and players on the block, Klay was typically stout. Here are a few examples:
Another element of Klay’s game that stayed intact post-injury was his ability as an isolation and low-block scorer. There were nights when Klay’s legs would come up dead on fadeaways and games where he was too aggressive hunting his own shots, but when things were right plays like these happened:
As expected, Klay played on a minutes restriction for much of the regular season and was held out of back-to-backs until the playoffs. There was a brief moment in January when Klay was held out of two games in a row because of a ”tweak” in his knee that made me fear the worst, but for the most part, he had a pretty ideal, if not, predictable physical ramp-up to the playoffs.
But Klay’s inconsistencies and occasional overeagerness seemed to grate on the impatient part of the Warriors’ fanbase, particularly on Twitter. Klay followed a 33-point performance against the Los Angeles Lakers with a nearly month-long stretch of 7 games where he took 16 shots a game in nearly 30 minutes on 34/29/82 shooting splits. That frustration seemed to peak during a Warriors’ 113-103 victory against the Denver Nuggets on March 10 where Klay shot 1/6 in the fourth quarter and Jordan Poole took the reigns as the second option in crunch time.
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