Golden State Warriors: 10 Steps To Winning A Championship

7. Keeping Klay Thompson

It’s amazing how easy it was to forget this, but there was a point in time where the Warriors were being laughed at around the league for their stubborn refusal to include Klay Thompson in trade talks that could’ve brought Kevin Love to the Bay Area.

Thompson became an All-Star and Third Team All-NBA player as his team won the championship; Love spent the season trying to fit in with the Cavaliers and had to watch the Warriors celebrate their title in a suit, being the unfortunate product of a shoulder injury in Game 4 of the first round of the playoffs that sidelined him for the rest of the postseason.

To be clear, Kevin Love is still a vastly underrated player. He spent the majority of the season with people unfairly questioning his statistical decline as Cleveland’s third option and if the Cavs don’t bring him back this summer, they’d be making a huge mistake. But from the Warriors’ perspective, putting their faith in the second Splash Brother paid off big time.

Thompson was a bit of a no-show in this Finals series, it’s true. He averaged a meager 15.8 points per game on 40 percent shooting for the series (30 percent from downtown) and his numbers for the entire postseason were similarly underwhelming after the first round.

But this is a guy who averaged 21.7 points per game on 43.9 percent shooting from downtown for the season, and the Warriors would not have been here without him. Even when his shots weren’t falling in the playoffs like they did during the regular season, he still managed to make some timely, backbreaking threes when his team needed him, and that’s without taking into account his incredible defensive impact.

Thompson was little more than a 3-and-D player last season. He was seen as one-dimensional and Love, coming off an incredibly impressive season as quite possibly the league’s best power forward, seemed like a tantalizing fit alongside Curry in pick-and-pop sets.

But at the end of the day, the Warriors put their trust in their young shooting guard, rewarding him with a max extension. In return, Klay Thompson rewarded his team by developing every area of his game and playing a huge part on a championship team.

Because of that, just a few months after everyone gave the Warriors hell for their decision to trust in Klay, nobody’s imagining what might have been with Kevin Love anymore.

Next: No. 6