Andre Iguodala

Every dynasty has a guy who made the whole thing work and never once asked for the credit. For the Warriors that was Andre Iguodala. Steph was the show, Klay was the flamethrower, Draymond was the noise. Iggy was the grown up in the room, and I'm not sure the run happens without him.

He was born January 28, 1984, in Springfield, Illinois, and played his high school ball at Lanphier. He went to Arizona for two seasons, made the All Pac 10 first team as a sophomore, and the Philadelphia 76ers took him ninth overall in the 2004 draft. He made the All Rookie first team and started all 82 games. He just showed up, every night, and that never changed.

Philly was his for eight seasons. Once Allen Iverson got traded in December 2006 he was the best player on the team, and he put up real numbers there, 19.9 a night in 2007 08. He made the All Defensive second team in 2011, his only All Star team in 2012, and he won gold with Team USA at the 2010 World Championship and the 2012 London Olympics. In August 2012, with the Olympics still going, he got moved to Denver in the four team deal that sent Andrew Bynum and Dwight Howard to new homes.

Here's the part I still love. In April 2013 his Nuggets lost a first round series to the Warriors in six games. He saw that young Golden State team up close, and that July he turned down a five year deal in Denver and came here in a sign and trade. Good free agents didn't pick the Warriors back then. He did.

Year one he was a starter and a menace, and he made the All Defensive first team in 2013 14. Then Steve Kerr showed up and asked him to come off the bench so Harrison Barnes could start. Think about what that meant to a guy like him. Through 758 regular season games he had started every single one. He said yes, came off the bench in all 77 games he played, and the Warriors won 67.

Then came June 2015. Down two games to one in the Finals, Kerr put him in the starting lineup for Game 4 in Cleveland, the small lineup took the series over, and Iggy dropped 22. He had 25 more in the clincher, spent the whole series chasing LeBron James around, and became the first player to win Finals MVP without starting a single regular season game. Seven of the 11 voters went with him. The other four picked LeBron, which tells you how hard that job was.

The next four years were the best basketball this place has ever seen, and also the worst night. He was runner up for Sixth Man of the Year in 2016 and again in 2017. He was the guy on the wrong end of the LeBron block in Game 7 of 2016, and I'm still not over it. He came back and scored 20 in the 2017 clincher, won a third ring in 2018 after a leg injury knocked him out of the end of the Houston series, and scored 22 in Game 6 of the 2019 Finals while Klay's knee and KD's Achilles gave out around him.

In July 2019 the Warriors traded him to Memphis to clear room for D'Angelo Russell, and they said on the way out the door that his number was going to the rafters. He never played a game for the Grizzlies. Miami got him in February 2020 and he made a sixth straight Finals with the Heat in the bubble, a loss to the Lakers.

He came home in August 2021. He was 37, his back kept acting up, and he missed 31 games in the middle of the season. He was still there for the 2022 title run, the fourth ring, and I'll always believe he mattered in that locker room way more than his 4.0 points a game. One last season in 2022 23 lasted eight games before a broken wrist ended it, and he announced his retirement on October 20, 2023.

He didn't exactly go fishing. Twenty days after he retired the players union named him acting executive director, and he ran the NBPA full time after that. He told the union in February 2026 he'd step aside when his term ran out that July, and David Kelly took over. Before all that he'd built a second career as a tech investor, wrote a memoir called The Sixth Man in 2019, and was part of the ownership group when Bay FC launched in 2023.

On February 23, 2025, after a 126 to 102 win over Dallas at Chase Center, the Warriors raised his number 9. He's the seventh Warrior with his jersey retired and the first from the dynasty core. Steph stood up there and told him he sacrificed ego for excellence. Nineteen seasons, 13,968 points, four titles, and the most important thing he ever did here was agree to sit down.

You won't find Iguodala on many lists of great shooters, and his playoff free throw percentage is ugly. Doesn't matter. When the Warriors needed one play, a stop, a three, the right pass, the ball kept finding him and he kept making the right call.

Look at the moments. A buzzer beater over Westbrook and Durant in his first month as a Warrior. Twenty two in his first start of the season with a title on the line. Twenty five in the clincher. Twenty in the 2017 clincher on 9 of 14. Getting a hand on Damian Lillard's last three in Game 2 of the 2019 West finals and then, a couple of weeks later, the dagger in Toronto that saved Game 2 of the Finals.

And he wears the miss too. He was the one LeBron chased down in Game 7, with 1:50 left and the score tied at 89, and he's had to watch that replay more than anybody. I hate that it's part of his story. But a guy who's scared of that moment doesn't keep asking for the ball, and he kept asking for a decade while guarding the other team's best player.