After 13 years of brilliance in San Francisco, it’s hard to imagine Stephen Curry playing anywhere else. Thanks to his talents on the court, and his leadership skills in the locker room, he has become the face of the Warriors, and he is the biggest celebrity in the city.
But did you know that the Dubs almost traded Steph back in 2012? Back then, the young Curry hadn’t yet developed into the polarizing star he is today and was dealing with a series of ankle problems that sidelined his early career.
Steph Curry’s Ankle Injuries Prevented Him From Being Traded To The Bucks In 2012
Apparently, the Warriors were close to trading Steph at one point, nearly agreeing to a deal with the Milwaukee Bucks before their team’s medical staff shut down.
(via Mike Chiari of Bleacher Report):
According to Frank Isola of The Athletic, Lasry laughed off Warriors owner Joe Lacob’s assertion three years ago that the Warriors were “light years ahead” of every other NBA team before telling the story of a nixed trade that would have sent Curry to Milwaukee for center Andrew Bogut:
“I don’t know if they can be light years ahead if they traded Steph Curry to the Bucks for Andrew Bogut. That was the deal. But the Bucks’ medical staff didn’t think Steph’s ankle would hold up. That killed the deal. So, I don’t know if that’s being light years. It’s luck. And that’s fine.”
That trade would have completely derailed the Warriors’ potential, and who knows what kind of shape they’d be in today. Fortunately, the Dubs decided not to include Steph in the deal and traded away Monta Ellis instead, who was out of the league after a few years.
The team’s former GM, Larry Riley, would provide some more details years later, where he suspiciously claimed that he actually had no intention of trading Curry at all.
“The only way to get the trade started was to let them start talking about Steph Curry. That’s like going fishing, you throw some bait out there. A couple of things happened with that. I wanted to switch the deal over to Monta all along. But in order to get a conversation going, we had to do that.”
No matter who or what you believe in this case, everything turned out fine for the Warriors — and the same might even be said for the Bucks, too.
Steph has become an icon for the Warriors, and his career with the franchise has come with an insane amount of prosperity. Meanwhile, for the Bucks, having Steph would have been great, but it may have made drafting Giannis Antetokounmpo impossible.
We’ll never know for sure how it would have panned out, but it’s crazy to think just how close Steph may have been to leaving the place he has now called home for the past 13 years.
