{"id":134658,"date":"2025-06-29T18:26:15","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T18:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/134658\/"},"modified":"2025-06-29T18:26:15","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T18:26:15","slug":"did-golden-state-attempt-to-land-another-florida-gators-guard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/134658\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Golden State attempt to land another Florida Gators guard?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Golden State Warriors landed one Florida Gators guard\u2014Will Richard<\/a>\u2014during the NBA Draft. Did they also try to get another? <\/p>\n

Tim Kawakami<\/a> of The San Francisco Standard<\/a> has an interesting piece this weekend about how Golden State approached the first round of the draft. Wrote Kawakami: The Warriors had a player spotlighted somewhere in the mid-teens they figured would fit perfectly with Stephen Curry & Co. right away; of course, they tried to jump into the first round to get him; and of course, I could mainly detect this just by watching [owner Joe] Lacob\u2019s courtside seat during Wednesday\u2019s Valkyries game at Chase Center, which he didn\u2019t get to until after halftime \u2014 and the end of the draft\u2019s first round.<\/p>\n

Kawakami then quoted Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy as saying this to him during his Thursday podcast: \u201cThere was a player that we liked in the middle of the first round that we made some offers to try and move up to get. I think the thought was a guy that probably could\u2019ve helped us this year coming up, and that\u2019s pretty rare coming in the draft. It wasn\u2019t a wide range of players; it was one guy. We tried to get in for it, didn\u2019t work out.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, who was that player? <\/p>\n

Kawakami speculated it was Florida Gators All-American point guard Walter Clayton Jr.<\/a>, the star of UF\u2019s national championship team. <\/p>\n

Wrote Kawakami: I asked around after Dunleavy confirmed the attempt and that led me to the most-lauded Florida guard, Walter Clayton Jr., a dynamic scorer who won Final Four Most Outstanding Player earlier this year and ended up going 18th to Utah.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t sound like the Warriors got too close to a deal, even as Clayton fell a little lower than expected. It\u2019s tougher to move into the first round these days than it used to be and it\u2019s likely that it would\u2019ve either hard-capped the Warriors at the second apron or cost a future first-round pick that might be pretty important for the Warriors to keep.<\/p>\n

Clayton was picked by Washington at No. 18 overall in the first round of the NBA Draft, then traded to Utah.<\/p>\n

Clayton was the first player in program history to earn first-team All-American honors and finished his 2024-25 season with 713 points \u2014 UF\u2019s single-season scoring record. He earned Final Four and West Regional Most Outstanding Player honors as well as SEC Tournament MVP. He scored a career-high 34 points against Auburn \u2014 becoming the first player with back-to-back 30-point games in the Elite Eight and Final Four since Larry Bird in 1979 \u2014 and 11 second-half points vs. Houston with the game-winning defensive stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Golden State Warriors landed one Florida Gators guard\u2014Will Richard\u2014during the NBA Draft. Did they also try to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,217,26564,231,772,1544,195,1491],"class_list":{"0":"post-134658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-college-basketball","10":"tag-florida-gators-basketball","11":"tag-ncaa","12":"tag-ncaa-basketball","13":"tag-ncaab","14":"tag-regwall","15":"tag-walter-clayton-jr-21-bartow"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/114768064277217972","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}