Kelly Oubre Jr. was an important part of the Golden State Warriors’ rotation the last season helping the team reach the final game of the play-in tournament.
Oubre will be an unrestricted free agent this summer and head coach Steve Kerr touched on Oubre’s season during his season-ending media availability.
He claimed that he would like to have Oubre back, but with Klay Thompson coming back from injury, his role will be mitigated to coming off the bench for the Warriors next season.
Oubre was asked about Kerr’s comments during a recent appearance on Chris Haynes’ podcast:
(via goldenstateofmind.com):
“I don’t even want to speak and elaborate on much on that situation,” Oubre said to Yahoo’s Haynes on his latest episode of the Posted Up podcast. ”But all I’ll tell you is that it put fire in my heart. It added more fuel to the fire.
“Being 25 years old, the way that my career has been shaping out, the growth that I’ve shown in my career to go from the 15th pick to continuously have my numbers grow each and every year and my role and opportunity on the team to grow each and every year to have a year where my opportunity is lessened, and then as the year goes on I’m put into this category of trying to shape out the future of the organization when I haven’t been given a fair opportunity to show what I can do on a large scale — yeah, it is unfair.
“But all I could do was go do my job and play. Keep focused and be professional. I was just worried about playing basketball for the team, and now I’m blessed to be an unrestricted free agent.”
With his latest comments, Oubre does not see himself as a bench player, and that could be a problem if the Warriors are in full health next season.
Oubre is expected to field a considerable amount of interest in free agency with his ability to play high energy basketball and score the ball.
