So who was it? I asked around after Dunleavy confirmed the attempt and that led me to the most-lauded Florida guard, Walter Clayton Jr., a dynamic scorer who won Final Four Most Outstanding Player earlier this year and ended up going 18th to Utah.
It doesn’t sound like the Warriors got too close to a deal, even as Clayton fell a little lower than expected. It’s tougher to move into the first round these days than it used to be and it’s likely that it would’ve either hard-capped the Warriors at the second apron or cost a future first-round pick that might be pretty important for the Warriors to keep.
But, as always, the Warriors’ operational mindset — which obviously carries through to next week’s free-agent movement period — is transparent for all to see. They will try to do big things, medium things, little things, and everything that they can imagine doing. They won’t be able to do most of them, but they will try. Even when there’s a very good Valkyries-Liberty game going on down the hall.
“I kept telling him, go down, this game looks exciting, and you should do it,” a chuckling Dunleavy said of Lacob. “And he wanted to stick it out until the end. There’s a few guys that were sort of sliding, he was, ‘You sure we don’t want to get in?’”
Practically, the Warriors now have two players that won’t take up much salary space, if they make the 15-man roster. Nothing’s guaranteed as the Warriors wade into free agency, but just knowing that Toohey and Richard aren’t complete projects gives Dunleavy some freedom when he goes shopping to add to Steph Curry, Jimmy Butler, Draymond Green, Brandin Podziemski, and the rest.
“I think the biggest thing for us is knowing the guys that are going to be here, how do we complement around them? How do we complement around Steph and Jimmy and Draymond and BP and Moses (Moody), go down the list?” Dunleavy said. “What do we need to add to that? I think there’s just some specific skill sets that we could use on both sides of the ball while also understanding what type of players work for us, what type of players can play for Steve (Kerr) within this system and with Steph and Dray and what they’ve done here for many years. It’s a tricky one. You’ve got a little bit of a needle thread with it. But there’s players out there we can get that can make us better.”