It's Pretty Weird Seeing Klay Thompson Officially Be Introduced As A Dallas Maverick

Thearon W. Henderson. Getty Images.

Even though it was bound to happen eventually since we got the news that the Klay Thompson era was coming to an end in the Bay Area, I can't lie seeing Klay be introduced as a Mav is weird as shit. This is certainly not the first time something like this has happened to a HOFer in NBA history, as the league is littered with this exact type of situation. A legend who changes teams late in his career and it just looks….weird.

Think along the lines of guys like Tony Parker

Kent Smith. Getty Images.

or Patrick Ewing

Fernando Medina. Getty Images.

Or Hakeem Olajuwon

Kent Horner. Getty Images.

Or MJ

G Fiume. Getty Images.

You get the idea. You cannot tell me looking at those pictures isn't weird as hell.

The thing is, the days of having a franchise player spend their entire career with one team are mostly a thing of the past. Players are playing longer, teams now have new CBA rules to navigate which sometimes means turning the page on a franchise legend, it's the simple reality of life in the league these days. 

That's pretty much what I kept thinking to myself as I watched the Klay introductory press conference. It's all just weird to my brain

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It's definitely going to take my brain a second to process the first time we see Klay in a Mavs jersey, just like it did for a guys pictured above. And while it's become the trendy thing nowadays to think Klay Thompson is some washed up bum, I think that's taking things to a bit of an extreme. Is he prime Klay Thompson? No. The guy is 34. Natural decline is pretty normal. But is he still effective as a floor spacer? I'd say so. The guy did shoot 38.7% last season from deep on high volume (9.0 3PA) and 41.2% in 2022-23 on 10.6 3PA a game. He was also 38% on Catch & Shoot 3PA last season, and something tells me playing off of Luka and Kyrie is going to result in a heavy diet of open C&S opportunities. Plus, even at this stage of his career he's still a much better option as an off ball shooter than someone like DJJ or Josh Green, so I see no reason why it can't work.

At the same time, this is also not the same lockdown defender that Mavs fans are hyping up at the moment. There are still questions that will have to be answered as to how a trio of Luka/Kyrie/Klay handle defending the perimeter after their issues were exposed rather loudly in the NBA Finals. As we saw, if you can't defend at an elite level against the best of the best, nothing else really matters.

And while I'm certainly not crying over the fact that the Warriors Dynasty is no more and it looks like we can finally put that era behind us, that doesn't mean we can't appreciate what one of the greatest shooters in the history of the NBA was able to accomplish during his time in GS.

Klay isn't the first NBA first ballot HOFer to follow this path late in their career, and he certainly won't be the last, but there is a part of me that is a little surprised it actually happened. Once the Warriors paid Draymond Green his 100M extension I figured they were going to just bite the bullet and keep everyone together until they retired, no matter the cost or what it meant for the team.

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Who knows, maybe Steph is next?