Klay Thompson is excited to have one of the greatest scorers in basketball history on his team, he tells Yahoo’s Shams Charania:
“I was sleeping,” Thompson told The Vertical, “and my brother came to my room and woke me up to tell me that KD committed. I didn’t believe it at first when he told me, so I had to check my phone and verify it. I was like, ‘Seriously? KD really chose us?’ It was an incredible moment for our organization, and I was psyched. We had the final form of our team.
“And then I went back to sleep.”
This team is the best that the sport has ever seen — on paper anyway — and it’s almost terrifying to consider how good they should be. There is no such thing as a perfect team, though, and critics will nitpick and question even a team as astoundingly talented as the 2016-17 Warriors. The question that many are asking is: “Who’s going to sacrifice shots?” With Durant, Stephen Curry, and Klay Thompson, the Warriors have three of the league’s most potent scoring threats in the same starting lineup. Durant is a historically efficient volume scorer. Stephen Curry is arguably the greatest shooter of all time. Thompson is tremendously talented as a scorer, but many assumed that he will be the third wheel of the three scorers. This, of course, speaks to the greatness of Durant and Curry, and is not a knock on Thompson in any way.
Thompson doesn’t plan on sacrificing anything, he tells Charania:
“I feel kind of disrespected that people keep using the term sacrifice to describe me and describe us,” Thompson told The Vertical. “We all want to see each other do well. But I’m not sacrificing [expletive], because my game isn’t changing. I’m still going to try to get buckets, hit shots, come off screens. I want to win and have a fun time every game we play.
Thompson may not like the term sacrifice, but when you add Durant — a player who averages 19.1 shot attempts per game for his career — there will be less shots to go around. Call it what you want, somebody, or everybody, will have to sacrifice shot attempts.
