What really led to Klay Thompson’s first NBA ejection

Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

Golden State Warrior’s star Klay Thompson was ejected from his first NBA game. We explore why.

NBA noted nice guy Klay Thompson received his very first NBA ejection on Tuesday night in a game between the defending champion Golden State Warriors and the defending regular season champion (and playoff failure) Phoenix Suns.

This was Klay’s 651st game without losing his cool. That’s quite a streak broken for a competitive player who’s been involved in some pretty important contests over his ring-winning career. We want to know what really happened to send Klay to the showers in a game that was very much still in the balance until his early departure. Spoiler alert: Chuck has a theory.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap of how it went down.

With about 6:30 left in the third quarter of a surprisingly intense game for October, the Suns were up 83-77 in a match that was headed for a fun finale. Then….well, we’ll let Golden State of Mind explain what happened:

A few minutes before the ejection, Thompson and fellow All-Star shooting guard Devin Booker started jawing at each other.

At a dead ball the two got into it more, and double technicals were called.

As Thompson worked his way back to the bench, he and Mikal Bridges briefly got into it, and gave each other minor shoves. Once Klay made it to the Warriors bench he turned and started yelling back at the Suns, which earned him a quick second technical foul, and a subsequent ejection.

Watch for yourself:

Ok, so we have Devin Booker who’s a big fan of Klay Thompson, loves Klay Thompson and even said after the game he wanted to be Klay Thompson when he came into the league going hard after one of his NBA heroes in a competitive game. Booker is on an absolute tear to start the season with 33 points per game and is, “Probably the most complete player in the league right now,” according to the completely unbiased opinion of his coach Monty Williams.

Can we just pause and gawk at a 50+ year-old NBA coach dunking the ball?

Back to the game where Booker and Klay are going at each other which, per Warriors coach Steve Kerr is a rivalry that goes back many years. Thompson had two points on 1-8 shooting at the time of the kerfuffle and Booker had 20 of his game-leading 34 points on 55% shooting.

Those numbers there are enough to frustrate a competitive guy like Klay Thompson but Kerr suspects it has more to do with a minutes restriction the Warriors’ star is dealing with as he continues his return from two serious injuries over the past few years. Klay, however, denies he’s frustrated saying he’s not worried about only playing 25 minutes and that, “I’m just going to go out there and play hard”. He said that before the game.

Now we have two possible theories of the case:

Klay is frustrated by young upstart Devin Booker scorching him 20 points to his 2.
Klay is frustrated by his minutes restriction.

And then comes NBA old people expert Charles Barkley with a third theory.

We see where this is going. We can connect the dots.

Embarrassed by younger player => Frustrated by bodily induced restrictions = Getting old.

That’s the kind of insight that earns Chuck the BIG DOLLARS.