OKLAHOMA CITY -- It started as a few drops. A sprinkle, really. Klay Thompson hit one 3-pointer in the first quarter of the Warriors' 108-101 victory in Game 6. Just one. He was squaring up, but the shots weren't falling. Maybe this was one final night where the Splash Brothers were cold. Maybe this was the night the Thunder closed it out and put so many demons away.
What the church-revival-like crowd at Chesapeake Energy Arena did not know, however, was that it smelled like rain.
Thompson hit ten -- TEN!-- 3-pointers over the final three quarters to finish with an NBA single-game playoff record 11 3-pointers en route to 41 points on 14-of-30 shooting. Thompson alone outscored the Thunder 33-9 from beyond the arc -- the Warriors as a team knocked down 21 threes. Do the math, and that's a 63-9 drubbing from deep. You always have a math problem when you face the Warriors in that, last time I checked, three is more than two, but that kind of discrepancy is mind-boggling.
Just watch Klay go to work.
You just can't watch these guys shoot enough, Thompson and Curry. It's unbelievable. A truly once-in-a-lifetime shooting backcourt. And they play for each as much as they do with each other. Every year they have gotten more and more in tune, become more and more deadly, and in Game 6 it all culminated in maybe the most impressive half of basketball, given the stakes and the stage, that we've ever seen from this tandem.
"He's been (supporting me) my whole career," Thompson said of Curry. "Everybody on this team believes in each other. They believe in me, and Steph told me before I went out in the fourth, 'This is your time. Put on a show out there and have fun.'"
That might as well be etched on the shield hanging over the great Castle Splash Brother. Put on a show out there and have fun. "All Klay needs is a sliver of daylight," Curry said, and it's true. In the early going he was squaring up and hitting relatively open looks, but by the end he was hitting the kinds of moon balls only this team hits. Defenders in his face. Five feet behind the line. Off balance. Didn't matter. Everything was falling.
"He has struggled to find a shot in this series but that is why he is who he is," said Draymond Green, who finished with 12 points and 14 huge rebounds, every one of them a fight. "(Those kinds of off-balance shots make) him the shooter that he is. He stays confident, he is always working, and it came through for us tonight."
Came through would be an understatement. With the Warriors' offense dying on the vine on the road in an elimination game, Thompson near single-handedly saved the season. Curry looked mortal for much of the first half, and this time it was Thompson's fire that helped ignite Curry as the defensive attention shifted to the less-heralded Splash Bro. Thompson has gotten lost a lot on this team. Curry is the transcendent force. Draymond Green is the team's "heart and soul." But it's been Thompson who has carried Golden State in these playoffs. He has been the team's best player, on both ends of the floor, night in and night out, since Curry went down in Game 1 vs. Houston.
First he stepped up vs. the Rockets, then he knocked down shots vs. Portland, and now he has come up something more than huge in these last two games to even the series after the Warriors went down 3-1. Thompson may be Curry's sidekick, but the soft-spoken 26-year-old maintains a lethally dangerous swagger that allows him to be the best player on the floor, a historic player at that, on any given night.
"He had all the confidence in the world," said Curry of Thompson's heroics. "He understood the moment."
And as such, this series, this whole season, is once again starting to feel like the Warriors' moment.
