It’s not easy to come up with a satisfactory bookend to a weekend that began with a four-year, $70 million contract extension. Draining a game-winner over a tough defender stuck in your hip pocket to beat a conference rival and keep your team undefeated, though … well, I mean, it’s not $70 million good, but Klay Thompson and the Golden State Warriors sure seemed to dig it.
With 14.5 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter and the Portland Trail Blazers leading 90-89 at the Moda Center on Sunday night, the Warriors prepared to inbound the ball in search of a go-ahead bucket. Coaches always tell their defenders to keep an eye on the inbounder in late-game situations like these; you’d figure Terry Stotts was especially interested in his Blazers doing so in this case, considering the triggerman was All-Star sharpshooter Stephen Curry. As it turned out, though — and as it’s been throughout the first three games of the season — the other “Splash Brother” was the man to watch:
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As the play began, Curry inbounded to Andre Iguodala on the left wing and Thompson sprinted from the right corner along the baseline under the basket, trailed closely by Wesley Matthews. Warriors center Andrew Bogut tried to clip Matthews with a screen under the basket, but the Blazers guard hustled around it; while Thompson was able to make a clean catch on Iguodala’s pass just a few feet away from the baseline, Matthews was right on him as he continued his curl into the paint.
No matter, though — Thompson dribbled into the lane, elevated, leaned back and used every inch of his 6-foot-7 frame to launch a fading floater over Matthews’ outstretched arm. The runner splashed through, giving the Warriors a 91-90 lead with 8.7 seconds remaining, and forcing Stotts to take a timeout to regroup to prepare a response.
He wouldn’t much like the answer the Blazers authored. Their attempt to re-take the lead was scuttled when Draymond Green poked Nicolas Batum’s inbounds pass away from All-Star big man LaMarcus Aldridge, leading to a Golden State steal, a Portland foul and a pair of Curry free throws that made it a three-point deficit. The Blazers compounded the sin on the ensuing possession, as Aldridge’s try for a long baseball pass down the court — Portland had no timeouts to advance the ball and just 4.5 seconds to find an equalizer — was intercepted by Curry, who hit another pair of freebies to seal a 95-90 win for Steve Kerr’s road Warriors.
Golden State now stands at 3-0, one of just four undefeated teams (along with the Miami Heat, Houston Rockets and Memphis Grizzlies) as we enter the second week of the season. The Blazers, who felt like they got the short end of the stick from the officials on a few late-game possessions, went scoreless over the final 2:01 and committed three turnovers in the final 25 seconds to fall to 1-2.
While the eventual game-winner over Matthews was Thompson’s biggest bucket of the night, it certainly wasn’t his loudest. That honor goes to his vicious throwdown in the mug of Blazers center Robin Lopez from just a few minutes earlier:
That posterization — and Lopez really would prefer we call it something other than “steamrolling,” or at least that you give him credit for doing the same type of dirty work on Bogut earlier in the game — shows what’s making the 24-year-old Thompson so dangerous right now. If you give him an inch of space, he’ll Pop-a-Shot from deep; he’s 10 for 22 from 3-point land (45.5 percent) through three games. But if you step up on him to take away his room to raise up, he’s become more comfortable at putting the ball on the deck and taking it to the rack — and with the Warriors having cleared out the left side of the floor and Portland’s defenders loathe to sag too far off the likes of Curry, Iguodala or Green lest they get an open look at a 3, you wind up with Thompson beating his man off the dribble and having just one tree to climb at the tin.
Klay, it seems, isn’t afraid of heights.
Thompson finished with a game-high 29 points on 11 for 22 shooting (3 for 7 from 3-point land, 4 for 4 from the foul line) to go with three steals, a rebound, a block and an assist in 34 minutes of work. The performance capped off a weekend that began with a max deal, continued with a blistering 41-point performance in a win over the struggling Los Angeles Lakers, and ended with Klay standing alone as the league’s leading scorer at 29.7 points per game.
After a strong showing for the gold-medal-winning U.S. squad at the 2014 FIBA World Cup in Spain, finishing behind James Harden as Team USA’s second-leading scorer, Thompson has kept his momentum going with a sharp start to the season, and he was there to deliver when the Dubs needed him most on Sunday.
“Those are the moments we play for, and that’s when it’s the most fun. That’s what the fans pay to see,” Thompson said after the game, according to Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle. “I didn’t want to lay a dud after a great game [Saturday] night. The greats always come out and perform again.”
It’s a bit early to anoint Thompson one of “the greats,” of course, but he’s certainly playing great in the early going, and that’s helped Golden State get off to a great start in what figures to be an intensely competitive Western Conference.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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