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Dieter Kurtenbach: Klay Thompson is gone and the Warriors' situation has gone from bad to worse

Dieter Kurtenbach, Bay Area News Group on

Published in Basketball

In short, he has ensured the Warriors won’t win another title with Steph Curry leading the way.

Is it all Dunleavy’s fault? Hardly. The inscrutable Thompson turned down a fair contract extension offer from the Warriors before the start of last season, opting instead to bet on himself.

Thompson lost that bet — his new deal is an annual pay cut of nearly $10 million from the Warriors’ extension offer. But instead of admitting that, he opted to pretend he won.

But Dunleavy hasn’t shown the negotiating chops or the roster-building creativity this precarious moment has demanded.

Instead, he helped drive the team off the cliff. In a job that demanded the stacking of wins, even small ones, amid roster arbitrage, Dunleavy came up woefully short move after move.

Coming into this offseason, the writing was on the wall: someone was going. The NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement made the Warriors’ previous spending habits far too onerous to maintain.

 

For Dunleavy, the choice was simple: can lose Thompson or you can waive Paul.

As disappointing as both of them were last season, the Warriors couldn’t lose both for nothing and maintain whatever competitiveness they had.

And yet that’s exactly what happened.

So I hope everyone enjoyed last season’s 46 wins and embarrassing play-in tournament exit to the Kings — that’s likely as good as things will be for a while yet.

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