Today on The Whiteboard, Klay Thompson has been a disaster and Warriors fans are starting to get concerned. Is this just who he is now?
After a strong start to the season, the Warriors have dropped six in a row and things are looking increasingly grim. Andrew Wiggins may have broken out of his slump with 31 points against the Thunder but the Warriors still lost, Draymond Green has three more games to serve on his suspension, Chris Paul can't hit anything from the field and Klay Thompson looks like a shell of himself.
We're still early in the season and all of these trends could turn around in plenty of time for the Warriors to make a deep playoff run but Klay's struggles are particularly concerning — because of his age, injury history and the fact that he's a free agent this summer and the Warriors will have to make a big decision about how much to commit to him.
So why has Klay Thompson been struggling so much?
He's missing some 3-pointers he normally makes
Thompson is currently shooting 33.0 percent on 3-pointers which would be the lowest percentage of his career by a mile — the only season in which he's ever hit less than 40 percent of his 3s was 2021-22 when he played only 32 games coming off an Achilles injury and he still managed to hit 38.5 percent that season.
However, digging a bit closer makes this number look more like random variance than a new career trajectory.
Thompson has hit 7-of-14 this season when there was no defender within six feet at the time of the shot. He's been an abysmal 7-of-36 (19.4 percent) when a defender was within four and six feet, shots which he made at a 42.3 percent clip last season.
However, it's not the case that he's only making wide-open shots and missing everything else because he's also hit 11-of-22 when defenders are within two and four feet. I don't believe that those specific defender distances are meaningful in and of themselves, but looking at each of them shows that, at this point in the season, his 3-point accuracy hasn't degraded uniformly and defender distance and defensive attention don't explain the variation.
What probably does explain the variation is the small sample. Thompson has attempted just 91 shots from beyond the arc so far this season, compared to 731 last season. We're still looking at an incredibly small slice of his inevitable total attempts and it's not entirely unprecedented.
In his first 12 games last season, Thompson hit just 33 percent of his 3-pointers. He finished the year leading the league in total makes and attempts, hitting 41.2 percent. In his first seven games of the 2018-19 season, he hit 5-of-36 (14 percent) before breaking out of his slump with a 52-point explosion that say him hit 14-of-24 from beyond the arc. HOWEVER, he made just 34 percent of his 3s over his next 12 games.
The point is, Thompson has had stretches of similar length where he has shot similarly poorly. And it's unlikely that this continues across the entire season. But that doesn't mean we aren't seeing real regression in other areas.
Klay Thompson has lost a step
Thompson has always been a fantastic shooter but historically he added additional value by running off screens, shooting off motion and doing some ancillary creation attacking closeouts. Those strengths have been shrinking for a while but it's become pronounced this season.
He's been incredibly ineffective at generating separation this year. Thompson was never an explosive athlete but his gravity beyond the arc required defenders to overplay him and he was savvy in the ways he used his size and body control to get himself open looks against a scrambling defense. That hasn't been the case this season.
Watch how hard Lu Dort closes out here and still manages to stay glued to Thompson, whose buildup and release on the pull-up jumper are so slow that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is able to slide down from the corner for the block.
Thompson is shooting just 40 percent on drives and has drawn just two shooting fouls on 31 drives across 12 games. He's still providing a minimal threat to the defense with the ball in his hands because of the legacy of his shooting, but as soon as he puts the ball on the floor, that threat has evaporated.
Klay Thompson is not a plus defender anymore
There was a time when Thompson was one of the best perimeter defenders in the league and he was a Second-Team All-Defense selection in 2018-19. But the injuries have really eroded his impact here.
It's a bit too early for accurately estimating his defensive impact with all-in-one metrics but 538's RAPTOR estimated him to be a significant net negative on defense last season and not much has changed. His steal rate is a career low, his foul rate is the highest it's been since the first three seasons of his career and he's been regularly getting burned by complementary scorers and creators like Jalen Williams.
As the season goes along, Thompson's 3-point percentage is almost certainly going to rebound and that alone will make things look a lot better and take a lot of the pressure off. But what has made Thompson so special isn't just that he's perhaps the second-best shooter of all-time, it's the way that shooting ability was complemented by defensive impact and offensive versatility. Those regressions seem less likely to reverse and are far more meaningful.
Thompson has incredible value for the Warriors. He's an elite shooter and his experience in their system can't be understated. But the Warriors are going to have to explore reducing his role and experimenting more with some of their other young players like Moses Moody and Brandin Podziemski to see who might be ready to pick up the slack later in the regular season and into the playoffs.
As to what this means for his upcoming free agency, the Warriors are going to have to decide how much of a hypothetical salary they're willing to pay for his legacy and how much for his present value. Just making him an offer based on his present value could lead to Thompson being the first of the Warriors' core three to depart.
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