Jealousy over salary numbers sank ‘Strength in Numbers’

Contract extensions with Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole in 2022 upset Warriors veterans Thompson and Green

The Golden State Warriors have embraced “Strength In Numbers” as their slogan during the Steph Curry era. But it was the numbers in the contract extensions handed out before the 2022-23 season that created bad feelings with some of the team’s veterans.

Ramona Shelburne reported that when the Warriors handed out multi-year extensions to Andrew Wiggins and Jordan Poole, it “didn’t sit right” with Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. Thompson, who had two years and roughly $84 million left on the deal he’d signed in 2019, wanted his own extension after winning the championship. Green, who was going into the final year of the contract, also felt disrespected.

We know what happened with Green. He punched Poole during a preseason practice, then turned his fury into podcasting. After the 2022-23 season ended in a second-round loss, the team sacrificed their two most recent draft picks plus a future selection to get out of the Poole deal, and Green got his own new contract for $100 million over four years. He channeled his remaining feelings of resentment into bludgeoning European centers like Rudy Gobert and Jusuf Nurkic.

Thompson got an offer for half the money and half the years Green got: $48 million for two seasons. He turned it down, then didn’t succeed with a number of contract proposals to the Warriors. The last one was for $40 million over two years, but the Warriors wanted to make other moves to improve the roster before making a decision on the other Splash Brother.

It’s understandable that veterans would be jealous of newer and younger players getting taken care of first, but as of the summer of 2022, Thompson had played only 54 games under his five-year, $190 million contract. He also spent the summer playing no basketball at all.

Still, he won four championships with the team and was a big factor in why a Warriors franchise that Joe Lacob and Peter Guber purchased for $450 million in 2010 is now valued at over $8 billion. Plus, while you could see the Wiggins and Pool contracts as an embrace of younger players, Draymond is only a month younger than Klay, and he got a four-year deal.

The result was two seasons that Thompson called “miserable” as he tried to recapture his old position and skill with a body that suffered two devastating injuries, on a team that was full of new players. Getting benched in favor of Brandin Podziemski clearly hurt Thompson’s pride, but it had already been wounded by all the business decisions made — and not made — in previous seasons.

Now he can leave the resentment behind and truly embrace the next stage of his career without being haunted by the shadow of, well, Klay Thompson. The Warriors made controversial-but-defensible business decisions in the past few years, but those don’t take into account for a player’s pride.

Thompson’s pride is a big part of how he came back from an ACL tear and an Achilles tear and grabbed another ring. It’s truly incredible that he came back to play 36 minutes a game during a title run after missing two-and-a-half years. But the Warriors should have known that a prideful player like Thompson, a man who used his press conference after the 2022 Finals win to call out Jaren Jackson Jr., whose team he’d beaten two rounds ago, over a disparaging tweet Jackson made three months earlier, was going to remember any perceived disrespect.

Now the Warriors are going to have to rely on their numbers again, hoping a combination of De’Anthony Melton, Kyle Anderson, and Buddy Hield can fill the Klay-sized hole on the roster. But nothing can fill the Klay-sized hole in all of our hearts.