The Golden State Warriors haven’t made many great signings in free agency. Here are their five best acquisitions.
Good things don’t normally happen to the Golden State Warriors.
The last few years would suggest otherwise as the organization has really turned things around since Joe Lacob and Peter Gruber bought the team and saved them from a toxic ownership. They’ve rarely made a bad decision and have lifted the team from the basement to the top of the NBA.
Despite their misfortune and poor management, the Warriors have had some great players suit up for them. From Wilt Chamberlain to Nate Thurmond to Chris Mullin, Golden State has some Hall of Famers in their history. Those guys were all drafted. Fan-favorites like Sleepy Floyd and Baron Davis were traded to the Bay Area.
When you spend as much time at the bottom of the standings as the Golden State Warriors did, you tend to get good draft picks and, over the last seven years, they’ve done a great job capitalizing on them, selecting their championship core of Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Draymond Green.
For a good portion of NBA history, a player was stuck with the team that drafted him for all of his career unless he was traded. Free agency and, more importantly, unrestricted free agency didn’t really exist until Tom Chambers left for the Phoenix Suns after the new collective-bargaining agreement in 1988.
Here are Golden State’s five greatest free agent signings in franchise history.
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