Ranking all of Steph’s teammates: #74 — Kent Bazemore
He wasn’t very good with the Warriors, but he’s quite good now.
On June 25, 2009, the Golden State Warriors drafted Steph Curry. Ten years and 16 days later, the Oklahoma City Thunder traded Russell Westbrook to the Houston Rockets. With that move, Curry moved to second in the NBA for longest tenure with his current team. The only player he sits behind is Udonis Haslem, though that feels like a technicality. At this point, Haslem is essentially an assistant coach for the Miami Heat, having appeared in just 43 games and played fewer than 300 minutes over the last four seasons combined.
During his time in the Bay Area, Curry has had 106 teammates who have appeared in at least one game. Some played in exactly one game, while others played in hundreds. Some never actually played in a game that Curry was active for, while others formed historically great partnerships with him.
And I’m ranking all 106 over the course of a few months.
Players are ranked — and stats are shown — based only on their time as Curry’s teammate. How good/bad they were in other organizations doesn’t matter. How good/bad they were on pre-2009-10 Warriors teams doesn’t matter.
To see all of the rankings thus far, you can click on the “Ranking Steph’s teammates” tag at the top of the article.
#74 — Kent Bazemore
Games: 105 (26th out of 106)
Points per game: 2.1 (T-92nd out of 106)
Rebounds per game: 0.6 (T-102nd out of 106)
Assists per game: 0.4 (T-84th out of 106)
Kent Bazemore might be the first person to make an appearance in this countdown who Warriors fans don’t have a single negative association with. Most Warriors fans like or love Bazemore. A few are indifferent. But there isn’t a single card-carrying member of Dub Nation that dislikes him. At least not that I’m aware of.
Bazemore came to the Warriors in the 2012-13 season as an undrafted rookie, which tempered expectations. The Warriors were finally starting to get good, but most fans still had associations with the team being full of selfish players looking for theirs, so Bazemore was a breath of fresh air. He only played 4.4 minutes yet was the first player off the bench to high-five teammates.
He smiled nonstop. He was loved by his teammates. He created some of the most epic bench celebrations in NBA history, creating a celebration highlight reel longer than most player’s highlight tapes.
He and Curry became close, and Bazemore is even credited as part of the reason why Curry ended up signing with Under Armour.
All this made him not just one of the most likable Warriors on the 2012-13 team, or on the 2013-14 team, but one of the most likable Warriors ever.
On the other side of things, he wasn’t particularly good with Golden State. His offensive game was raw as raw could be, and he shot just 27.4% from beyond the arc and 57.5% from the free-throw line — center-like numbers from a wing. His defense was promising, but not nearly good enough to make up for the fact that he was gigantic negative on offense.
In his second season, the Warriors flipped him and MarShon Brooks to the Los Angeles Lakers for Steve Blake. And thus ended his Dubs tenure.
But it’s still a happy story. Warriors fans remained attached to Bazemore, so everyone delighted in him rapidly developing. In the 2015-16 season he averaged 11.6 points, 5.1 rebounds, 2.3 assists, and 1.3 steals per game for the Atlanta Hawks, who rewarded him with a four-year, $70 million contract prior to the 2016-17 season.
Not bad for an undrafted wing who entered the league without a jumper.
Safe to say, Warriors fans will always love him.