The trajectory of the Dallas Mavericks franchise changed drastically in 2025. They went from having Luka Doncic and a ready-made contending roster to blowing everything up and starting from the ground up — with Cooper Flagg now tasked to lead the team to a new era of winning basketball.
Flagg was brilliant in his rookie campaign, averaging 21.0 points, 6.7 rebounds, and 4.5 assists per contest, and it’s not too difficult to imagine him making an incredible leap in his sophomore season. But considering how stacked the Western Conference is, it will take a lot for the Mavs, a team that finished with a 26-56 record this past season, to crash the postseason party.
It makes sense for the Mavs to continue trending younger, especially after trading away Anthony Davis, the main return in the Doncic trade, to the Washington Wizards. To that end, Klay Thompson, the sharpshooter they acquired in the summer of 2024, could be the next to go.
Thompson was brought in to be the missing piece for the 2024 roster that made it to the NBA Finals. Instead, the Mavericks roster just transformed completely in front of his eyes. He’s now become a bench player at the age of 36, but he’s still a reliable shooter (38.3 percent from deep last season on 7.6 attempts per game). This could make him an underrated get for a team with contending aspirations.
These are a few teams that make sense for Thompson as a trade destination should the Mavericks decide to set him free.
Golden State Warriors
The Warriors are always going to be an easy inclusion in potential Thompson trade destinations. It just makes sense for the longtime Warrior to wind down his career on the team where he established his legacy in, especially now that Golden State seems to be all but out of the title race.
Stephen Curry remains brilliant, and Draymond Green remains a defensive savant, but the Warriors roster has become noticeably worse around them. It has not helped whatsoever that Jimmy Butler tore his ACL this past season and he’ll be out for a long time — tying up the Dubs to a player with a huge contract who can’t suit up on the floor.
With Steve Kerr returning for another year of coaching, the Warriors organization appears to be well content with just giving the core members of their dynasty an opportunity to ride off into the sunset. That would not be complete without Thompson, Curry’s backcourt mate, Splash Brother, and four-time NBA champion in the Bay.
It’s not quite clear as of the moment what the Warriors could trade for Thompson. Are they going to be willing to part ways with Moses Moody amid his patellar tendon injury? That seems unlikely. There is no way that Golden State is going to trade away Brandin Podziemski and Gui Santos for a 36-year-old Thompson who’s in the final year of his contract.
Whatever the case may be, the Warriors and Thompson deserve a storybook ending together. Whether that materializes this offseason is unclear. Perhaps the Dubs will be better off simply waiting for Thompson to hit free agency next year or for him to negotiate a buyout with the Mavericks.
San Antonio Spurs
Thompson is not even close to the player he once was. The burst of speed is gone, and amid his athletic decline, he has become a worse defensive player and a more inconsistent producer on offense. But what Thompson is able to bring is experience, veteran smarts, and the ability to show up in the postseason — things that the San Antonio Spurs would benefit a lot from.
The 2026 NBA Finals showed that the Spurs might have been one or two veteran pieces away from getting over the hump. And Thompson’s gravity on offense is never going to wane. Him running around would already open up a lot of space for the team’s creative young guards, and he always has the potential to pop off for a random explosive scoring game in the playoffs.
Should he have one of those poor shooting nights, the Spurs could just easily limit the veteran sniper’s minutes.
But similar to the Warriors, it will be a problem for the Spurs to cobble together the salary needed to match Thompson’s $17.46 million cap hit for next season. A trade involving Keldon Johnson could work, salary-wise, but there is no way the Spurs are going to trade such an important piece of the locker room for someone on the tail end of his career.
Nonetheless, in terms of fit and contending potential, Thompson could make a huge mark in San Antonio.
Detroit Pistons
The Pistons, by all accounts, had a wildly successful 2025-26 season. They won 60 games in the regular season, and they came to within one win of making it to the Eastern Conference Finals. However, it became clear yet again that the Pistons need to give Cade Cunningham more help from an offensive creation standpoint, as he was running on fumes by the time Game 7 against the Cleveland Cavaliers came along.
Do the Pistons have the appetite to pull off a huge trade, say, for someone like Trey Murphy, or, thinking more ambitiously, someone like Devin Booker? They have been remarkably patient on the roster-building front, but as the Oklahoma City Thunder have shown, young teams on the rise need to make moves to bolster the roster instead of just building the entire roster through the draft.
If the Pistons prefer to take it more slowly (or if they simply couldn’t pull off a blockbuster trade), then swinging a deal for Thompson could be helpful. A contending team can never have enough shooting, and Thompson would help space the floor for a Pistons team that saw Cunningham face a mountain of double teams but fail to make the opponents pay consistently due to a lack of production from deep.
Thompson is not going to be a ground-breaking addition for the Pistons by any means, but he’ll help improve the team with each made three-pointer in the Motor City.
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