Explain One Klay: Thompson vetoes Kerr for his 1st basket on his big return; plus Klay's nasty dunk
He ain't sacrificing... diddlysquat
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It sure was fun watching Klay come back and put on the show in the 2022.01.09.CLE-GSW game. I just really enjoy watching Klay Thompson, play basketball, and I enjoy how much delight his teammates take in his success.
But there's an interesting story about his very first bucket in two and a half years. It came on the first play of the game and Steve Kerr said Klay was not originally supposed to shoot the ball. Then Steph Curry commented on Klay's changing the play and he gave a little bit more detail.
So I did a little investigating and I believe know what the original play was. This is a play that the Warriors have run a few times before and I've been calling it invert stagger, because there's always a stagger screen on top set by smalls. I’ll show you a couple of examples of the previous versions of the play, and then show you how Klay changed the play.
Plus, bonus coverage of a certain dunk.
Co-starring Stephen Curry, Juan Toscano-Anderson, Gary Payton II, and Andrew Wiggins. With Draymond Green yelling, Chris Chiozza fainting and Jordan Poole conducting an independent analysis.
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I kind of dig that Klay was given a long leash in that way. I imagine it won't be necessary much in the future- he probably felt a need to test out all his gears (layup/dunk/3) and amazingly enough got them all out of the way pretty quickly.
Oh this was awesome Eric! Hilarious and really cool to see you reverse engineer what Kerr and Steph were talking about.