002 // Klay Thompson, Collective Delirium, and Basketball as Religion
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A decade ago inside Oracle Arena, I watched a man break basketball.
Not in the way fans pretend to watching Summer League, or the way the ‘Bryce James is a PROBLEM 👀’ infographic industrial complex insists on it. I mean something truly supernatural—something that, for the first and only time, made me consider divine intervention.
Growing up a diehard Warriors fan, my siblings and I figured out early that we could leverage my January birthday into one guaranteed game a year. Before the Steph era, those nights mostly meant Adonal Foyle autograph hunting and watching the Dubs get their doors blown off—but I didn’t care. I was in there.
That year’s game, by an act of God I’ll never deserve to understand, was the night Klay Thompson got hotter than any human ever has and scored 37 points in the third quarter against the poor, poor Sacramento Kings.
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It’s been a decade, and humanity still hasn’t truly processed DEFCON-1, hyperthermonuclear, fully blacked-out Klay Thompson.
It started innocently enough. With 8:24 left in the quarter, the game was tied and full of vintage Warriors slop: nothing going from three, turnovers everywhere, Boogie Cousins doing whatever he wants in the paint.
After another kicked ball, my brother and I agreed this was another Pacific Division weeknight rockfight, born to be forgotten as soon as the League Pass junkies pick over the carcass. Little did we know we were 45 seconds from stepping into the Book of Revelation.
On the very next possession, as if hearing me, Klay leaped into a passing lane, calmly weaved through defenders, and drilled a transition three. He now had 5 in the third.
By then, we knew there are few things more dangerous than #11 seeing one go through. Some shooters get confident. Klay gets possessed.
‘Wait a sec,’ he grinned, gripping my shoulder.
A few trips later, Klay hit another three, directly in front of the Kings bench. The murmur from the crowd turned electric—like Dylan at Newport, but with more believers.
Suddenly, Steph’s throwing him a 2-on-1 fastbreak lob, and Klay’s vertical is doing things it never has before. From there, just watch the raw CSNBA feed.
To end the quarter, Klay went 13-13 (9-9 3PT) and didn’t take a free throw until the waning seconds. He outscored the Kings 37-22 in the third, 18-3 in the final three minutes.
Also, Nik Stauskas deserves worker’s comp for what happened to him out there.
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Inside the building, each shot somehow appeared more difficult yet touched less net than the last. I’m pretty sure he quite literally 360 no-scoped them at one point. Let me attempt to convey what last month’s ‘On this Day’ graphics did not: this was not a basketball game. This was a religious experience.
During a typical heat check, you might feel the crowd sync with the game’s rhythms: simmering on defense, building in transition and peaking when another shot goes up.
This was not that.
From the moment he flushed the lob, Oracle was at 11. It didn’t matter who had the ball, or even who had possession. We were watching a phenomenon. A collective decision had been made that, until that man misses a shot, nothing else in the universe matters. And if he keeps making these, it’s possible nothing else ever will.
Crescendo after crescendo, one increasingly outrageous 27-footer after the next. Fans spilling into the aisles, bench players spilling onto the court, opposing players staring into space. Unmitigated, exponential euphoria, reaching a level of collective delirium typically reserved for performative healing in revival tents.
A fever dream. A mass hallucination event. Both benches looked like David Blaine just instructed a German Shepard to name their first crush. Someday our DeepSeek overlords will reconstruct this game’s bbref page like scholars deciphering ancient prophecies. The same way we study Kim Jong Un’s golf scorecards.
Around the seventh straight three, I stopped yelling and started laughing. This was like if T-Mac did it for 8 minutes and was literally trying to miss for the last three of them. Before that, ‘endangering the structural integrity of the arena’ wasn’t really on the heat check continuum.
This was Lewandowski scoring 5 in 9 minutes. This was Bolt running 9.58. This was Queen at Live Aid. This was the Barter 6.
“I thought we might get a technical foul, because our guys were all over the arena,” said Steve Kerr. “I think Barbosa was in lower Section 23.”
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Steph is Steph, but he also became that closer to 2013, the year Mark Jackson* labeled them the greatest shooting backcourt ever – when Klay was in his second year and Steph was perceived by the national media as a human walking boot.
In about 20 minutes of real time, the world learned no one – Steph, Kobe, Reggie, Ray Allen – had ever hit Klay’s level of incomprehensible, borderline spiritual, arm-wrestle-God-and-win type of unconsciousness.
See also: the time he gave the Pacers 60 in 29 minutes on 11 dribbles (and great content). Or when he needed only 27 minutes to make 14 threes (lol) and break the record against the Bulls.
Klay’s final form—a fully maxed-out, transcendental per36 supernova—could never exist. The game would never stay close enough to let him finish it. A very Pagliacci curse for a guy who just wants to smoke weed, sail his boat, and play Rock Band.
A lot of guys can get hot. But so hot the other team visibly dissociates? So hot Kerr’s postgame starts with ‘not even Michael’?
Klay reaches a frequency where the game itself stops computing. An emotional gumbo of bewilderedness, group chat texts, and a strange sense of gravity seeing it all live.
There are hot streaks, there are heat checks, and then there’s whatever Klay turned into that night—a rupture in the known fabric of basketball, a statistical impossibility best left unexamined, like Neo seeing the black cat glitch twice.
I’m glad Klay got paid, and I can’t wait for when he retires on a one-day.
But it’s been 10 years, and I still don’t know if I witnessed history or sorcery.
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A brief epilogue on Mark Jackson:
I will admit that this was one of the coldest callings of a shot from a coach you’ll ever see. It’s also very true that Jackson was a huge part the dynastic, immovable object that the core became. Namely, in his impassioned, undying and at the time irrational belief in Steph and Klay – the belief that actually, yes, jump shooting teams can win championships, Chuck.
But, for every way he empowered them, he also, you know, openly referred to two gay staff members as ‘penis grabbers who were going to burn in hell’,
Or… publicly fired our beloved White Mamba, after asking every coach (in front of the team) if he should, or… told us we can’t “appreciate the butterfly without the caterpillar”.
Or… the time he brought Steph onstage at his church in Charlotte, anointed his recently-operated-on ankle with oil, and didn’t let him leave until he flailed around, healed by the Holy Ghost.
Or… the time he told reporters that beloved journeyman center Festus Ezeli was ROOTING AGAINST THE TEAM while injured.
Or… the time he bullied assistant coach Darren Erman so egregiously, the team caught him recording said bullying as proof, prompting Jackson to fire him – not before requesting his parking spot be moved as far as possible from the entrance to the facility.
Or… maybe I’m just a salty Warriors fan and there’s a secret other reason he hasn’t had a job in the league since.
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