Klay Thompson has left the Golden State Warriors to join the Dallas Mavericks on a rumoured three-year, $50 million contract. 

The departure of a franchise icon marks the end of a tumultuous relationship. Thompson hasn’t been the same player since injuring his ACL and Achilles tendon in successive summers, despite playing an important role in the Warriors’ 2022 championship win in his first season back. 

Thompson was in the third year of a five-year, $189 million contract with Golden State, and he knew he would miss the whole 2019–20 season. The Warriors were unaware that he would also miss the following season. They ended up paying him almost $70 million over two seasons, during which he did not play a single game. 

Thompson has seen the Warriors sign Jordan Poole to a $123 million extension and Draymond Green to a four-year, $100 million contract last summer over the last three seasons. Prior to this season, it was reported that Thompson was offered a two-year, $48 million extension, though The Athletic’s Anthony Slater stated that [the Warriors and Thompson] have differing versions of the firmness of the offer and, again, the true desire of the franchise’s lead decision-makers to value him as a can’t-lose member of the core.”

That last bit is critical. Thompson, who declined to sign an extension last preseason, became a free agency this summer. He had been removed from both the starting and closing lineups at various stages during the season, and he began to question management’s “true desire” to bring him back. 

According to Slater, Thompson implored Stephen Curry not to use his celebrity status to coerce management into keeping his splash brother. From Slater:

It’s been a layered five-year path to this divorce, splintering last season, sprouting earlier, and culminating in the last few weeks, where Thompson, according to league sources, requested Stephen Curry not to exert his significant organisational influence and raise the temperature with management to ensure Thompson’s return. Curry’s measured voice, even if it changed the outcome, would not alter Joe Lacob’s or the front office’s real desire to have Thompson return.

Thompson understands this. It’s all about pride. After all he has provided to the Warriors in the form of a basketball dynasty that has resulted in a roughly $8 billion franchise valuation, he wants to be wanted back solely on his own merit. He wanted it to be based on his own past and present value, rather than as a pretentious gift from the front office to Curry. 

The solution to all of this is probably somewhere in the middle. The Warriors valued Thompson, but not as much as he wished. They would have delighted to have him back on their terms, not his. Slater claims Thompson’s choice to quit “became easy when the Warriors kicked him down the summer pecking order.”

The Warriors’ primary goal was to go below the luxury-tax line, and they eventually made an attempt to trade for Paul George. The message, as Thompson understood it, was that they would deal with him after more pressing problems. 

Thompson didn’t hang around. He wanted to be a priority, but Golden State wasn’t in a position to give him that. That’s the hard truth of the professional basketball business. He isn’t the player he used to be. He was instead treated with a lack of urgency, which reflected the player he has become. Tough business, but business nonetheless. Thompson may one day come to realise this.