Klay Thompson’s homecoming to The Bay started well before he hit the floor last night at Oracle with the Mavs and roughly 19,000 fans started waving nautical Captain hats.
It started mid-way through last season, when Golden State didn’t signal they’d immediately be resigning Thompson as the franchise had, up to then, always been in a hurry to. There were shades of it along with Thompson’s frustrations in his game changing, the splashy shots not falling as fluidly as they used to. Clues came in the way the Warriors felt their frustrations as a team: once together, a cohesive unit, and then splintering and individually.
“Even from July, when Klay decided to go to Dallas to us showing up for training camp and him not being here, it was kind of like a slow build to this night for everybody,” Warriors point guard, Steph Curry, said after last night’s game.
Basketball isn’t played in a vacuum, and Curry sharing the psychic and emotional timeline of the team underscores that in a rare glimpse behind the curtain. Sometimes its brightest full-circle moments have to struggle through discomfort, angst and loss in order to come back around. Often, the storylines with the most ups and downs are the ones that end the most cathartically.
Since this season began, Thompson’s been candid about how necessary the move to Dallas was for him. “Every pro athlete’s human, and uncertainty can bear on you,” he told ESPN prior to Tuesday night’s homecoming game.
“Honestly, it’s rejuvenated me and done something I needed bad just for my mental [state] and my career,” Thompson said.
It’s a knife’s edge between animosity for an athlete’s who’s left a franchise they share a storied history with and sympathy for their decision. What tips fans to one side or the other can skew personal, so isn’t always easy to predict, but Thompson’s tendency toward honesty helps. He’s always been someone who wears what he’s feeling on the floor openly, and for that fans — for the most part — respond with empathy. There’s a sense that through all the years he played for the Warriors there was an open conduit of conversation between him and the fanbase.
The way franchises respond to athletes opting out has changed. Due in part to the rise of player movement, athletes are more individualized than they ever have been in the NBA’s history. Other factors that play in are the brand-ification of athletes, as in, each person becoming their own mini empire of endorsement deals and personality partnerships, plus the sense through social media that we have 24/7 lenses into players lives. This accelerated autonomy certainly has its drawbacks — the parasocial feeling of ownership over an athlete because fans feel so close to them — but an uptick in empathy for athletes overall as a side-effect, well that’s a positive.
It’s because of this that we’re seeing tributes to athletes’ individual homecomings go from three to five minute montages played at the first time out (those are still great), to all-encompassing, multi-faceted endeavours. When Pascal Siakam returned to Toronto for his first game as a Pacer, the MLSE organization coordinated an entire section — 628 fans — to wear different versions of his jersey, and the months-long Vince Carter tributes that culminated with Carter’s jersey retirement took all arms of the franchise along with the municipal government of the city itself.
Not all athletes get to go home again. To be celebrated as a mainstay of a franchise, one has to play for that franchise for a significant stretch of time. This might be an unseen drawback of the aforementioned player-movement movement, but there are still plenty of athletes who see the appeal and have been vocal about putting roots down in one place.
For his tribute, Thompson said he was prepared for it because he “didn’t want to cry”. Curry, who was originally going to make a speech at half court, decided against it at the behest of Thompson, who a few days before asked him not to. Curry instead watched from the tunnel so he could have some semblance of privacy, and Draymond Green admitted he’d watched the tribute days before to steel himself. On the surface, these details are small, but each taps into the history the night marked and, maybe most importantly, shows how to move forward with gratitude.
