Klay Thompson

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Full name

Klay Alexander Thompson

Born

1990-02-08, Los Angeles, California

Nationality

American

Height

6′6″ (198 cm)

Position

Shooting guard

Teams

Golden State Warriors, Dallas Mavericks

Klay Thompson is the second-best shooting guard of his era and one of two basketball players who can credibly claim 14 made threes in a single NBA game. He spent thirteen years in Golden State, won four championships, set the single-quarter scoring record at 37 points in twelve minutes against the Sacramento Kings on January 23, 2015, and came back 941 days after a torn ACL and a torn Achilles to lift the 2022 Larry O’Brien Trophy beside Stephen Curry. He is, in 2026, a 36-year-old veteran wing for the Dallas Mavericks. He is also the son of a number-one overall NBA Draft pick and the brother of a Major League Baseball outfielder, which is one of the more unusual basketball-family configurations in the sport’s modern history.

The Thompson family

He was born February 8, 1990 in Los Angeles. His father, Mychal Thompson, was the first overall pick of the 1978 NBA Draft (Portland Trail Blazers) and a two-time Lakers champion as a Showtime-era reserve big man, including the 1987 and 1988 back-to-back titles alongside Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The elder Thompson, a Bahamian-American center who grew up in Nassau before college at Minnesota, became a Lakers radio analyst after retirement and held that job for the rest of Klay’s childhood.

Klay was the middle of three sons. Mychel, the oldest, played four years at Pepperdine and turned professional overseas. Trayce, the youngest, was drafted in the second round of the 2009 MLB Draft by the Chicago White Sox and played seven seasons in the majors, including a 2017 stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers. The Thompsons had Lakers season tickets at the Forum and then at Staples Center. Klay grew up in visiting locker rooms.

He attended Santa Margarita Catholic High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, an hour south of Los Angeles. His senior year (2007-08) he averaged 21.2 points and led Santa Margarita to the Division III state championship. He was a four-star recruit, ranked in the top 100 nationally by Rivals, and committed to Washington State University rather than UCLA, USC, or Arizona, all of whom were in on him. The reason was Tony Bennett, the head coach in Pullman whose father Dick Bennett ran one of the most distinctive defensive systems in college basketball. Klay wanted to learn it.

Washington State

Tony Bennett left for Virginia after Klay’s freshman year. Ken Bone took over. Klay played three years in Pullman and left as the all-time leading scorer in Washington State Cougars men’s basketball history with 1,756 points (later passed by CJ Elleby). He averaged 12.5 as a freshman, 19.6 as a sophomore in 2009-10, and 21.6 as a junior in 2010-11, winning the Pac-10 scoring title. He was first-team All-Pac-10 twice. He briefly suspended himself after a March 2011 marijuana citation, missed the Cougars’ Pac-10 tournament opener, and returned to drop 43 points on Arizona in the final regular-season game of his college career.

He declared for the 2011 NBA Draft on April 4, 2011.

The 2011 draft and the Warriors gamble

The Golden State Warriors took him eleventh overall on June 23, 2011. The team had finished 36-46 the previous season under Keith Smart and had just hired Mark Jackson as head coach. Stephen Curry was entering his third year, still being talked about by some inside the front office as a potential trade chip because of the chronic ankle issues that had derailed his sophomore season. The Klay pick was unpopular with a section of the fan base that wanted Kemba Walker or Kawhi Leonard.

Two seasons later the conversation changed. Klay averaged 16.6 points as a sophomore in 2012-13, made 211 threes (then 13th in NBA history for a single season), and helped the Warriors reach the second round of the playoffs for the first time since 2007. He and Curry, by then officially the Splash Brothers, broke the single-season three-point record as a backcourt pair: 484 combined makes that year.

January 23, 2015

The single-quarter scoring record set on a Friday night against Sacramento is the highlight of Klay’s career as a counting-stat artifact. He scored 37 points in the third quarter of a 126-101 home win at Oracle Arena. He went 13-for-13 from the field, 9-for-9 from three, and 2-for-2 from the line in twelve minutes of playing time. The previous record was 33, held jointly by George Gervin (1978), Wilt Chamberlain (1962), and Carmelo Anthony (2008).

The shot chart is preserved on Basketball-Reference and is, even ten years later, one of the strangest shooting nights in the league’s database. Every shot was contested. Sacramento’s coach Tyrone Corbin used three different defenders. Klay scored on all of them. He has said in multiple interviews since, including a 2015 Lee Jenkins Sports Illustrated feature, that he does not remember most of it. Curry, who fed him eight assists in that quarter alone, described it later as the moment everyone on the Warriors bench understood Klay was a true second star and not a complementary shooter.

The Warriors won the championship that June, beating LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in six. Klay averaged 15.7 in the Finals. The team finished 67-15 in the regular season, the best in franchise history at the time.

Game 6 in Oklahoma City, May 28, 2016

The 2016 Western Conference Finals were the closest the Warriors came to losing the season they finished 73-9 (still the regular-season wins record). Down 3-1 to the Oklahoma City Thunder of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook, the Warriors had to win Game 6 in Oklahoma City. Klay scored 41 points and made 11 three-pointers, then a Western Conference Finals record. He hit eight straight from deep across the third and fourth quarters. The Warriors won 108-101, closed the series in Game 7 at home, and reached the Finals, where they ultimately lost to LeBron James and the Cavaliers in seven (the famous 3-1 comeback). Klay’s Game 6 in OKC remains, by most standard playoff Win Probability Added measures, one of the five most valuable single playoff games of the modern era.

Durant signed with the Warriors that July. Klay won championships in 2017 and 2018 with that group. In Game 3 of the 2017 Finals, with the Warriors going for the 3-0 lead at Cleveland, he drilled four straight threes in the third quarter and finished with 30. The Warriors won 118-113. They went 16-1 in those playoffs, the best playoff record in NBA history at the time.

October 29, 2018: 14 threes in Chicago

The single-game three-point record came on a Monday in late October at the United Center. Klay made 14 threes on 24 attempts in 26 minutes against the Bulls, breaking Curry’s previous record of 13. Curry watched from the bench for most of the second half, which was a Steve Kerr decision; the Warriors were up 30 and Kerr did not want either Splash Brother on the floor with starters cleared out. Klay scored 52 points in 27 minutes. He held the record outright for two and a half years and held a tied share of it until December 2024, when Tyrese Haliburton matched the 14, and again until Curry himself put up 15 against the Heat in March 2025.

The 941 days

The 2019 NBA Finals, Game 6 in Toronto on June 13, ended Klay’s career as the player he had been before. He landed awkwardly in the third quarter on a dunk attempt, came back into the game to shoot two free throws (both makes) before walking off, and was diagnosed the next day with a torn ACL in his left knee. The Warriors lost the series in six. He missed the entire 2019-20 season.

On November 18, 2020, ten days before he was scheduled to return, he tore his right Achilles tendon during an offseason workout in Los Angeles. He missed the entire 2020-21 season as well.

He returned on January 9, 2022, against the Cleveland Cavaliers at Chase Center, exactly 941 days after Game 6 of the 2019 Finals. He scored 17 points in 20 minutes. The Warriors won. He played 32 regular-season games that year on a careful minutes restriction and entered the 2022 playoffs as the team’s third-best perimeter scorer behind Curry and Jordan Poole. The Warriors beat Denver, Memphis, Dallas, and Boston in the Finals. Klay averaged 19 points across the four series. The 2022 championship is, by his own account in a Marcus Thompson II Athletic feature published the following October, the championship that meant the most to him.

The boat, the dog, and Cap’n Klay

Klay bought a 36-foot Axopar powerboat in 2018, named it Joe Bruin (a continuing dig at his Pac-10 rivalry with the UCLA Bruins), and began appearing on social media docked at Marina del Rey on game days. The boat became a small running joke at NBC Bay Area and on Inside the NBA, with Charles Barkley on multiple occasions calling him Cap’n Klay. He bought a second, larger boat (a Cobalt R30) in 2021 and named it Joe Bruin II. His English bulldog Rocco, who has his own Instagram account with several hundred thousand followers, walked the carpet alongside him on the Warriors’ 2022 ring-night ceremony.

The 2024 Mavericks signing

The Warriors offered Klay a two-year deal in the summer of 2024 that started below $20 million annually and reflected the front office’s view that he was no longer a max-money player. He turned it down. He signed with the Dallas Mavericks on July 7, 2024 on a three-year, $50 million sign-and-trade deal that returned Josh Green and three second-round picks to Golden State. He left as the Warriors’ second-leading three-point shooter (1,827 makes, behind only Curry) and a four-time champion.

His first season in Dallas began with Luka Dončić as the centerpiece. By February 1, 2025, the Mavericks had stunned the league by trading Luka to the Lakers for Anthony Davis, covered in detail on our Luka biography. Klay played out 2024-25 as a complementary shooter for an AD-led team that lost in the first round of the playoffs. In June 2025 the Mavericks won the draft lottery and selected Cooper Flagg first overall. Klay enters 2026-27 as the veteran on a young Mavericks team rebuilding around Flagg, AD, and Kyrie Irving.

Career résumé

Klay finished the 2025-26 regular season with 18,041 career points, 2,378 career three-point makes (fifth all time, behind only Curry, Ray Allen, Reggie Miller, and James Harden), and four championship rings. He is a future Hall of Famer the moment he becomes eligible. His 2015 single-quarter scoring record and his 2018 single-game three-point record (since matched by Haliburton, broken by Curry) are both, by basketball-historical convention, the kind of artifacts that mark a player as a defining shooter of his generation. He is the only NBA player ever to make 60 or more three-pointers in five different playoff series.

For the era he played in, alongside the player who broke shooting itself, he was the second-best shooter in NBA history. That second-place finish puts him roughly where his father finished his Lakers years: alongside the most defining player of the moment, contributing in the role that championships were built on.

Gear

Shop official Klay Thompson jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or pick up Marcus Thompson II’s Golden.

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Sources

• Basketball-Reference: Klay Thompson, Mychal Thompson.
• Sports Illustrated, Lee Jenkins, “The Splash Brothers Have Arrived” (March 2015).
• The Athletic, Marcus Thompson II, “What the 2022 ring meant to Klay Thompson” (October 2022).
• San Francisco Chronicle, Connor Letourneau, “Klay Thompson signs with Mavericks” (July 7, 2024).
• ESPN game recap, January 23, 2015 (Warriors 126, Kings 101).
• ESPN game recap, October 29, 2018 (Warriors 149, Bulls 124).