There was plenty of joy in Chase Center Tuesday night, but that did not feel like the dominant emotion from the victors. Stephen Curry and Draymond Green were on a mission months in the making to prove something to their long-loved and now former teammate Klay Thompson.
Seriousness defined their approach. They were focused. The matchup had playoff-level intensity. The pregame speech Curry was supposed to give was nixed in the spirit of the contest. There were little jabs throughout the night.
It began with Curry fouling Thompson, a "weird way to start the game," as he put it. Thompson later pulled out an "awful" — assessed by both Curry and Green — shimmy to imitate Curry after a three.
And in the moment that Curry — almost prematurely — hit the dagger, the attention went to his patented "night night" celebration. But read his lips. See the emotional drain on his face as he screamed into the camera. To my eye, his lips read (at least the last line):
"You miss it here!"
Lip reading is imprecise — it could be "you better stay here" — and Curry was asked after the game what he said. He said he honestly could not remember.
But in that moment, he is screaming at the top of his lungs, launching a message to the world, and yet, largely to his brother on the other side of the court. He looks like he's on the verge of shedding tears.
In the moment after they shook hands following the whistle, Curry shook his head.
"Man," he says, before walking off the court.
"Some of it was competitive," Curry said of the matchup. "Some of it was fun."
I will not attempt to, with a broad brush, state exactly how Curry and Green and Steve Kerr feel. To say they are feeling exactly one thing feels like a gross oversimplification.
But this wasn't some clearly happy reunion. These two sides split apart, and the Warriors worked tirelessly to make sure they came out on the winning end of their first meeting. It was a little awkward — Curry said he didn't even know when to say hi to Thompson, and did so right before tip — and extremely competitive.
Green shrugged off the entire crowd's tipping of their caps as a moment for Thompson, not himself. He watched the pregame tribute video beforehand to make sure he'd be locked in on the game and the game alone.
"When you play against somebody you close with, you want to beat them even more," Green said. "You want to play well against them even more. It just raises that level of competition. Seeing him over there, you want to play great. You want to do great things. That was the kind of mindset... If I'm totally honest with you, I had zero emotions towards, 'this is Klay's return.'"
He stated an intention to see Thompson in the offseason, but indicated communication would be pretty frosty until then. Thompson, it must be noted, was in the Warriors locker room after the game, catching up with his old teammates.
"I saw him. I told him, 'Way to shoot,''" Green said. "As far as keeping in touch, you ever tried to keep it in touch with Klay? It’s a very one-sided thing. So the love is there, the relationship is there. I'll get back in touch after the season — we'll both be in LA. Gone kick it and spend some time together, but I'm not adding more gray hairs to myself just trying to chase Klay down. No chance."
Curry, Green, Kerr — all the Warriors and staffers and other people in the organization — love Klay Thompson. That has never been in question. Those are relationships bonded in sweat and blood and four championships. No one should question the depths of their fathoms-deep friendships.
But a fracture happened, and Tuesday reflected that. There was a celebration of Thompson's time, but it was matched with tension, with competition.
The Warriors, as it stands, are quite explicitly on the winning side of the breakup.
But breakups aren't zero-sum games. There is debris and carnage, and even if it's best for everyone involved, that first reunion doesn't feel comfortable. Both sides wished they could have avoided this breakup in the first place. Thompson was always supposed to retire a Warrior alongside Curry and Green. But injuries, egos, age and time had other plans.
Time has that horrible habit of always moving on. And with it, though, wounds heal.