CHANGE AGENT
Thompson’s epic effort saved ’16 West finals, opened door for Durant
OAKLAND — Klay Thompson was halfway through this conversation, patiently reliving and recounting as much as he could, when he stopped, shook his head and found the words he was really seeking.
“God, I can’t believe it’s a year already,” Thompson said with a resounding full-body shrug.
Yes, it does seem amazing. Of course, the date (May 28, 2016) and the circumstances (Game 6 of the Western Conference finals in Oklahoma City, with the Warriors trailing 3-2 after a record-setting 73-victory regular season) are permanently rooted in practical fact and history.
But a blink or two after it was over, after Thompson’s 41point performance, and playoffrecord-setting 11 3-pointers (on 18 attempts) kept the Warriors’ season alive that night, the moment seemed like it was already existing out of time and beyond normal sports dimensions, moving into some higher, cloudier plane.
This was the game that changed everything, even though it didn’t lead to a Warriors a championship, and by itself joins Michael Jordan’s shot against Utah in the 1998 NBA Finals, the Patriots-Raiders “Tuck Rule” playoff and just a handful of other iconic sporting events that stand alone, immortal and in their own elevated cosmos.
A playoff game for all-time, leaving mortals strewed about in its wake.
“I know that if not for Klay’s remarkable performance,” Warriors assistant coach Jarron Collins said recently, “there’s a different road being traveled right now.”
One large consequence: Thanks to Thompson, the Warriors won Game 6, went on to finish the series comeback by winning Game 7 at home, moved on to the Finals against Cleveland, and then lost.
And those were probably the exact details necessary to draw Kevin Durant from the Thunder to the Warriors in July, which ended the Thunder’s tenure as a Chief NBA title contender and kept
the Warriors from having to decide whether to pay Harrison Barnes and Festus Ezeli large long-term dollars, among many other developments.
Did the Warriors sense the weight of all of this, even before Game 6 against Durant’s Thunder a year ago?
“Somewhere in the back of your mind you’re definitely thinking, ‘Hey, if we lose this, there’s no shot (at Durant),” Draymond Green recalled.
For Thompson, looking back now, as the Warriors get set to play the Cavaliers again in the Finals, his memories of that Game 6 focus directly on the immense energy-level it took to beat the Thunder compared to the Warriors’ recent conference-final sweep of San Antonio.
You can draw a line separating the two series — one of them was against Durant, this latest one was with Durant as a Warrior, which wouldn’t have happened if Thompson hadn’t had that Game 6 a year ago.
“I don’t really think about all the things that fell in line afterward, which is crazy to think about,” Thompson said. “Because now when I do watch it, there’s even more weight on all these shots I’m putting up.
“It’s unbelievable how it all aligned afterward. I do believe it was meant to be. Feels like destiny.”
Ultimate test
Even now, 11 months after losing the Finals to Cleveland, the Warriors speak about the Thunder series in the starkest terms, and Game 6 as the ultimate test.
Not the Cavaliers with LeBron James, who actually did beat the Warriors in last year’s Finals after the Warriors took a 3-1 series lead.
Ask Steve Kerr about last year’s Western Conference finals, and he remembers scrambling to figure out any kind of strategic move that could change the course of the series.
“But honestly there really wasn’t one,” Kerr said recently. “Sometimes there’s just a move like the Cleveland series the year before or even the Memphis series. All right … let’s have (Andrew) Bogut guard Tony Allen; that’s a really major move but it makes sense. Then the Cleveland series, OK, let’s start Andre (Iguodala) to open up the floor.
“But during that OKC series, there just wasn’t a move to make. We just had to play better. Man, they were so difficult to play.”
Curry was limited by leg injuries, and he struggled. Durant and Westbrook were helped by key performances early in the series from supporting players such as Dion Waiters, Steven Adams and Andre Roberson.
And, through the first four games of the series, Durant, Adams and Serge Ibaka bottled up the Warriors, especially Green.
“Not a lot of teams make Draymond look like a small forward, but their front line was so big,” Thompson recalled.
So the Warriors lost Game 1 at Oracle, won Game 2, but then got clobbered twice in Oklahoma City to go down 3-1.
Which led to Kerr’s post-Game 4 speech to the team, saying that all they had to do was take care of their home games — Games 5 and 7 at Oracle — and win one time at Oklahoma City. Just once. That would be Game 6.
“I was just being honest — when you’re down 3-1, you just have to win that next game and it does change,” Kerr said. “As Cleveland proved last year, too.”
‘We can do this’
The Warriors won Game 5, then headed back to Oklahoma for the one road game they needed.
Warriors owner Joe Lacob watched Game 6 unfold from his seat near the Warriors bench.
“That was one of the best basketball games I’ve ever been to,” Lacob recalled. “Just because of the stakes. We were down 3-1, we were on enemy territory.
“After three quarters, I think we were down eight or 10 (the Warriors trailed 83-75 to start the fourth). And I remember saying to Bob (Myers, Warriors GM), ‘I still think we can do this, I think we’re going to do this.’ Eternally optimistic.
“And then Klay just went nuts. It was just so exciting for us in the sea of all these Oklahoma City fans.”
‘Nothing to lose’
The Warriors — and Thompson — did not start fast. Later, Thompson deadpanned that he should’ve made 13 threepointers because he missed some easy ones early.
“I remember starting the game like 2 for 10, three for 10—something bad,” Thompson recalled. (He started 2 for 10 and was 3 for 11 in the first quarter, with only one made threepointer.) “But I told myself, ‘Hey, you’re either going to shoot your way into it or out of it.’
“Because I was playing with the mindset of we had nothing to lose, even though at the time we had something to lose ... Record-setting season, whatnot. But in my mind I was saying, ‘We have nothing to lose. This is a great team. Just go out there and play free-minded, and don’t think about the consequences.’
“I think I learned something about myself in that moment.”
Did Kerr sense that it was all set up for Klay to explode? No, nobody was sure of that, not with the Thunder playing at such a high level.
But the construct and wizardry of this team is that the Warriors can come up with something remarkable out of thin air. Curry wasn’t ready to break out, so then the Thompson barrage began.
“It just happened,” Kerr recalled. “That’s the thing with both Steph and Klay—it can always just happen. Isn’t always going to, but it’s always possible.
“I felt it turned when Klay made one from the top of the key, six feet behind the line ... he wasn’t really open ... I don’t remember who was guarding him, just remember he caught the ball and just launched and it was one of those shakeyour-head shots.”
In the second quarter, Thompson started getting hot, usually by racing around the court searching for Bogut on a lot of plays, curling around a big Bogut screen, getting the pass and firing.
Without him, it would’ve been scary for the Warriors. The Thunder was playing well, but led only 53-48 at halftime. The Warriors were within striking distance, and the Thunder crowd knew it.
“You could just kind of feel the energy when each shot would go in,” Thompson remembered. “That’s what I probably felt the most.”
Thompson made two more 3-pointers in the third quarter, his fifth and sixth of the game, and then came the fourth quarter, with the Thunder threatening to blow it open.
That was when Curry took his usual rest, but made sure to give a rare pep talk to Thompson, who is famously the least demonstrative member of the Warriors and probably the most underrated.
Coming out of the break, Curry pulled Thompson aside and told him that it was his time. Be himself. Take over. The Warriors always joke that Thompson is never afraid to shoot the ball, but on this night, at this moment, Curry practically demanded that Thompson turn into an alpha scorer.
Maybe, in this red-hot series, it had to come down to the coolest-running Warrior. Do remember those stirring words, Klay?
“It wasn’t as cliché as that,” Thompson recalled, smiling. “But it was about as cliché as it gets. It was like a ‘Hoosiers’ moment.
“He just told me to just do me. Hunt for good looks. And that really resonated going into the final 12 minutes ... I definitely think it helped me knowing Steph trusts me in that moment. That definitely helped me be myself even more.”
Thompson’s two quick 3-pointers to start the final period kept the Warriors in the game, and then Curry checked back in. And Thompson kept on shooting.
“They had the game pretty much well in hand,” Green said of the Thunder, “and then Klay happened.”
Thompson went on to make five three-pointers in a row in that final period.
With 4:57 left, and the Warriors trailing 96-89, Thompson got the ball from Green not far from the half-court line, with his feet facing toward the sideline, paused, then, right in front a disbelieving Westbrook, jumped, turned his body to the basket, and buried the shot, his 10th 3-pointer.
Amazing 30-footer
“I think it was when I hit that one — what was the shot? Top of the key, feet were all off, it was like a 30footer,” Thompson said.
“I knew after that went in — we were down four points — that, all right, the ball is feeling good and if I get a few more open looks, this is going to be a game.”
That was the frozen moment, right there, and the Warriors all agree that they knew they were going to win once that shot went in.
“Of course the one that was seemingly from half-court,” Lacob recalled when I asked for his favorite moment of the game. “It’s the one that’s etched into my memory. It was like ‘WHAT JUST HAPPENED?’”
Thompson hit one more three in the last minutes, Curry made two of his own, the Warriors’ defense swarmed Westbrook and Durant, and the Warriors won the game 108-101, sealed by a Curry floater over Ibaka.
And the series was headed back to Oakland for Game 7, which Kerr had already promised them they would win.
“I just remember feeling like …we got this,” Kerr recalled of the moments after Game 6. “Everything had shifted. We kind of sneaked out of there by the skin of our teeth, but I knew that we were going to take care of business at home.”
Which they did. Curry scored 36 points with seven 3 pointers, the Warriors finished the series with a Game 7 victory, and it was on to the Finals.
Of course, the Warriors painfully lost to Cleveland in seven games. But if they had beaten Cleveland, they probably wouldn’t have ended up with Durant. And that’s some tangled destiny.
“I don’t think we would’ve gotten him had we won the championship, and I don’t think we would’ve gotten him had they beaten us,” Kerr said of Durant.
“Who knows what would’ve happened in the Finals between them and Cleveland, who knows if he would’ve still felt comfortable if they had gone to the Finals, but my gut feeling is everything sort of played out and we ended up with him as a result of everything that happened.”
Not hot of late
This year, Thompson did not have a similar moment in the Western Conference finals against San Antonio — no such epic performance was necessary — and he is only shooting 38.3 percent in the postseason.
But that does not mean he won’t have another moment, and Thompson reminds himself of that by re-watching Game 6.
“Say, these past couple of weeks, I’ve had a few bad shooting nights — I’ll watch those highlights,” Thompson said. “Not just that one, but any good shooting night I had against a team coming up.
“But obviously I see those highlights a lot because I was in a zone that I try to tap into. It’s hard to get to that zone, even when it’s not 11 threes, even if it’s just four or five. But the way I was moving, I was shooting it with no hesitation.
“I just try to look at what I did right in that game and I learn from it still to this day.”
On that night, Thompson celebrated the victory quickly on the court, then jogged back toward the Warriors’ locker room; in the hallway, Lacob spotted him first.
That’s when Lacob fell to one knee and gave Thompson a deep, ecstatic bow.
‘Pretty humbling’
“That was pretty humbling to see the owner in awe of the performance you had,” Thompson recalled. “It feels good as an employee knowing that he’s getting back his investment.”
That’s Thompson’s typical dry commentary, but you can tell on the video of the moment that Thompson was surprised and thrilled (or as thrilled as he gets) by the gesture.
“Spur of the moment,” Lacob remembered. “He saved our chance to get a Game 7.”
It happened a year ago, because of Klay Thompson, who, to the surprise of nobody on the Warriors, kept putting off this interview with me about the game, the performance, and the legacy of it all.
He told me he was focused on right now, on the series at hand, and didn’t want to look back. When he did sit down with me, Thompson was patient and thoughtful and acknowledged the impact of this game.
But you could tell he mostly wanted to continue to look forward, to new things and new challenges, because you never know when you might have the chance to change the world again.
My gut feeling is everything sort of played out, and we ended up with him (Kevin Durant) as a result of everything that happened.” Warriors coach Steve Kerr