Klay Thompson sometimes gets lost on the Golden State Warriors. It’s no fault of his own – the team just has two of the five-best basketball players alive and the best defensive player in the world, so even though he is an established star, Thompson is oftentimes the team’s fourth-most important player.
For example, did you know that Thompson had a career-high in points per game this year, averaging 22.3 points a night? His best scoring performance was easily his 60-point explosion that occurred in December. Thompson scored that many points in 29 minutes and did not play in the game’s fourth quarter. To somehow make his night even more absurd, Thompson only dribbled the ball 11 times in the game.
When TNT’s Shaquille O’Neal considers all of this, he cannot fathom why Thompson did not make it onto any of the All-NBA teams this year. The Hall of Famer expressed his disgust late Thursday night in a tweet that included a selfie and random all-caps to make sure you could see how confused and frustrated he was that Thompson was left out.
KLAY THOMPSON DIDNT MAKE A ALL NBA TEAM ARE YOU KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW, I'm with u DRAYMOND GREEN this is some Bs klay had 60 wit 11 dribbles pic.twitter.com/8kAYxtkiuR
— SHAQ (@SHAQ) May 19, 2017
Thompson didn’t end up with the best single-game point total this year – that went to Devin Booker, who hung 70 points on the Boston Celtics. But it cannot be stressed enough that Thompson scored 60 points in 29 minutes and dribbled 11 total times. It’d be hard to do that in a game of NBA2K, but Thompson managed to do that in real life.
This one game probably does not warrant a spot on an All-NBA squad because … well, it was one game. But if you want to make the case that Thompson deserved a spot on an All-NBA team because he was great this year, you can absolutely do that based off his production all season.
