Nba, Klay Thompson returns to the field almost 1000 days later

The time has come. Almost a thousand days later, Klay Thompson is ready to put on the number 11 shirt of the Golden State Warriors, to re-experience an NBA parquet. The one where he has long dreamed of returning, the one he has grown up on, the one he misses so much that he has become an obsession. “Klay is crazy, he can’t wait to play,” said Draymond Green, as Thompson’s column of the dynasty. It will happen tonight, at 2.30 am Italian time, in Golden State-Cleveland at Chase Center in San Francisco, in what has become his new home but in which he has not yet played.

Calvary

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For someone who travels in life on bread and basketball, with the sole exception of the dog Rocco and the boat that he allowed himself to pass the wait, two years without playing is an eternity. A much more excruciating suffering than the injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament of the left knee (June 2019 in game-6 of the Finals, his last time on the NBA parquet) and the injury to the right Achilles tendon in November 2020. Thompson attacked the first rehabilitation with a lot of enthusiasm, but he experienced the second accident (which happened during a match on the pitch, a few hours from the 2020 draft) as a curse that plunged him into a period of depression that he tried to fight also through social media, through Instagram direct from his boat where he was trying to get back in touch with his fans, imagining what his return day would be like. “I know what Klay has been through, I’ve seen him up close, the good days and the bad days, the days he talks to anyone and the days he doesn’t say a word – said Green -. He deserves to come back because he gave his all to this game. I am happy for him, because no one has been through what he has been through in the last two years. And I’m happy for us as a team ”.

The return

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Klay wants to break the world. He still has in his head the exclusion from the list of the best 75 NBA players ever (“I know what I did, I am convinced that I should have been on that list”), which he intends to use as a motivation. He also compared himself with Kevin Durant, who came back in a great way from the Achilles tendon injury of Game-5 of the 2019 Finals, to be sure to return to the field in the best possible conditions and to be immediately protagonist. “I am delighted to be back on the pitch and to remind people who I am,” he said recently. They forgot it because I’ve been out for two years, but I’ve never been hungrier than now. The best way to prove to people they were wrong about you is to win ”. When he stopped, Thompson was one of the top 25 NBA players, one capable of being excellent in defense while scoring more than 20 points per game, one who would be the star of at least 25 other franchises and one who sidelined the Warriors. ego and worked hard to win. Klay worked to be that player right away, to immediately demonstrate what the NBA have been missing in these two years. “It will take time – recalls coach Kerr -: not only for him to recover completely but for everything to work as it should at the team level. But it’s nice to have him back “. It’s good for everyone, not just for him.