SAN FRANCISCO — Maybe Mike Dunleavy Jr. had a very direct message to deliver on Monday, maybe it was a slightly coded signal to his roster and the rest of the league or maybe he was just speaking honestly about this Golden State Warriors moment.
The mood of his 20-minute pre-draft media session, though, was clear: The Warriors aren’t panicked about their fall to a Play-In Tournament spot and their crumbling loss in that game a few months ago, they aren’t desperate to start a roster overhaul around Stephen Curry, they don’t feel rushed to decide what to do with Chris Paul and, maybe most jarringly to Warriors fans, they’re not hellbent to make sure that Klay Thompson re-signs in July.
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The Warriors are not staggering. They are calm. They are assessing their options, short-, middle- and long-term. They will do what they’ve got to do. And — rightly or wrongly — losing a foundational figure might be part of this process.
Yes, it’s an uneasy time for this franchise. It feels like the dynasty is mostly just a receding echo. It will feel even weirder and emptier if and when Klay departs. Maybe the Warriors should feel a bit desperate. But Dunleavy, in his second offseason as Warriors general manager, is a cool-hand executive by nature, somewhat in contrast to his great predecessor, Bob Myers, who occasionally wore his heart on his sleeve during especially fraught moments and has joked that he left the Warriors a year ago because he didn’t want to face the decisions that Dunleavy is dealing with exactly right now.
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The first really big decision of this offseason: How to handle Klay’s free agency as the Warriors begin to shift into a new era. It’s already gotten pretty emotional and rightly so — it’s hard to imagine the Warriors without Klay and Klay without the Warriors. But at some point, that will likely happen; either Klay will want a fresh start or the Warriors won’t offer him enough or it’ll be some combination of those factors.
In what looks like it could be a chilled market for veteran shooters this summer, I think there’s a decent chance that the two sides will find a financial compromise to bring Klay back next month at something like $20 million a season for two years. That’d probably be an overpay, but emotion and sentiment have to be part of it — Klay’s number will be retired and he’ll have a statue outside of Chase Center at some future point.
But what if Klay can’t stand being shuffled down in importance this summer? And, when Malik Monk, a younger and probably more dangerous scorer than Klay, just accepted about $19 million a year from Sacramento, what’s Klay’s real market? How much should honoring Klay be worth to the Warriors when they must get younger and more athletic and are focused on doing that while getting under the punitive apron and hoping to get under the luxury-tax line as well?
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“I think, look, I think I’m reasonable, I’m rational,” Dunleavy said. “That’s how I’m always going to operate. But to say a guy like Klay Thompson, who has meant so much to this franchise … to completely strip the emotion away from (how hard to push to keep him), I think that’s almost impossible.
“But this is a business. We’ll talk through things and continue to talk through things. Like I said, we are hopeful, but you know, we’ll see. We’ve got to figure things out.”
The underlying point is that Dunleavy likely has decided that he can’t lock himself into anything with Klay until he knows whether he can trade Paul, whose $30 million contract for next season must be guaranteed by Friday or he’ll become a free agent himself (unless the Warriors and CP3 agree to push the deadline back into July to give both sides a chance to gather more information). For instance: What if the Warriors can acquire a great shooter for CP3’s contract? Then they probably wouldn’t have much to spend on Klay and might not have a lot of minutes to give him, either.
The Warriors have priorities heading into the start of the free-agency period next week and, to be relatively blunt, it’s pretty clear that Klay isn’t first on that list. Or second.
Dunleavy isn’t saying that he’s ready to let Klay go. But he’s definitely not shaping this whole offseason just to make sure that Klay stays.
But that doesn’t mean Dunleavy is hinting about a big, imminent trade, either. Of course, Joe Lacob’s Warriors are always eager to chase superstars, and I don’t doubt that they’ve tried to leverage themselves into the potential trade market for Paul George. But unless a lot of things break their way (such as: George picking up his option for this season and demanding that the L.A. Clippers trade him to the Warriors and only the Warriors), I don’t see the Warriors as leading contenders for PG13. Other teams have far more trade ammunition and financial flexibility.
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Also, furthering Dunleavy’s even-keeled approach, he said he intends to hold onto the team’s best young players — Jonathan Kuminga, Brandin Podziemski, Moses Moody and Trayce Jackson-Davis. And if the Warriors aren’t trading one of those guys, it’d be almost impossible for them to make a splashy trade.
“We really value those guys,” Dunleavy said. “We’ve drafted them. We’ve grown them. They have played really well. We are excited about them. A scenario to move them would take a lot. It’s important for us to be good now and then be good also in the future.
“But the main thing is, we think those guys can contribute and help our group now. If that was not the case, we would be more open to stuff, but it is. So we are excited for those guys’ growth this year and I expect them to be with us.”
Reminder: A year ago, on his first official day on the job, Dunleavy said something very similar about Jordan Poole’s status going into the offseason, then Dunleavy traded Poole for CP3 a few days later. I bring this up not as criticism, just as a note. GMs are under no public obligation to tell the whole truth in offseason pressers, and they also are very much allowed to change their minds. But could Dunleavy quickly change his mind on Kuminga & Co. this year just like he did with Poole 12 months ago?
“To be clear, I said I expected Jordan to be back on the team next year, and I did at that point,” Dunleavy said, after a slight chuckle. “But this thing changes so quickly, especially when there’s a deadline in place, whether it’s a trade deadline, draft, free agency. Things change like that.
“So I reserve the right to go back on — or I wouldn’t say ‘go back’ because I said … I expected him to be back, like I do all the guys we have under contract, I really do. Like, there’s nothing going on right now where I’m like, man, this may not happen or whatever. So things can always change. Draft goes on. Picks become available. Something changes. But on the whole, I feel pretty comfortable with the group that we’ve got.”
We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks. But this year, Dunleavy’s statement seemed far more solid than anything he said about Poole and for stronger reasons. Poole had signed but hadn’t even officially started his $123 million deal at that point. The Warriors had a keen interest to get off of that if they could, and then they realized they could. All of their current crop of young players are still on their rookie deals, though Kuminga and Moody are eligible for their rookie extensions this summer.
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Dunleavy’s going to do some things this summer. He’ll probably make a surprising trade. He might do something interesting with the Warriors’ only draft pick this week, No. 52 overall. But Dunleavy is determined not to sound harried or to do anything impulsive. It’s not the likeliest or warmest way to get Klay Thompson re-signed, but it might be the canniest. It’s a savvy way to run the offseason, too.
GO DEEPER
Negotiations between Klay Thompson, Warriors frozen as free agency looms
(Top photo of Mike Dunleavy Jr., right, with Warriors owner Joe Lacob: Rocky Widner / NBAE via Getty Images)
