Larry Riley is forever a Golden State Warriors hero for standing firm in June 2009 against the logic they should flip the seventh pick for a veteran and certainly against much of his own roster. Golden State already had the popular Monta Ellis at point guard, Amar’e Stoudemire was a trade possibility after just averaging 21.4 points and 8.1 rebounds for the Phoenix Suns, and good luck finding many people in the Bay Area who could come within 1,000 miles of picking out Davidson on a map. But Riley as general manager was steadfast.

He wanted Stephen Curry.

Stephen Curry was the No. 7 overall pick in the 2009 NBA Draft.

The decision changed a franchise and a league, that’s all, how Curry went to Oakland, fought through ankle problems that threatened to ruin a career that had barely started, and turned into an international star now in his third straight Finals.

The Warriors were picking seventh. Blake Griffin (LA Clippers), Hasheem Thabeet (Memphis Grizzlies), James Harden (Oklahoma City Thunder), Tyreke Evans (Sacramento Kings), Ricky Rubio (Minnesota Timberwolves) and Jonny Flynn (Timberwolves) had been taken. Curry was on the board right about where projected going into June 25, 2009, in the middle of the lottery, with Jordan Hill (New York Knicks), DeMar DeRozan (Toronto Raptors), Brandon Jennings (Milwaukee Bucks), Terrence Williams (New Jersey Nets), Gerald Henderson (Charlotte Bobcats), Tyler Hansbrough (Indiana Pacers) and Earl Clark (Phoenix Suns) to follow in the top 14.

In Oakland, events had broken perfectly.

NBA.com: What was your Draft board that night?

Larry Riley: Had we had the No. 1 pick, we would have screwed up and missed on Steph Curry because we would have taken Blake Griffin. I did, however, at the press conference when we brought Steph Curry in and introduced him, I did stand up, and Raymond (Ridder, the team vice president of communication) probably got it on record. I said, “I think Steph Curry’s the second-best player in the Draft and I would have picked him No. 2 and Steph Curry will set out to prove me wrong, that he should have been No. 1.”

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I’ve never forgotten that and it’s interesting that it turned our pretty much that way. Our board would have had Blake No. 1. I didn’t like Thabeet. Candidly, I didn’t like Jonny Flynn. The choice would have been, I suppose, whether we would have maybe taken Harden or Curry if that kind of a scenario had presented itself where we were No. 3 or 4. That would have also been a choice to make. I would have been leaning toward Curry. I wasn’t a Tyreke Evans fan. I call him a manufactured point guard. You can make the argument the same way with Curry.

There were a lot of people who argued that Curry was a shooting guard, was a two. We saw him as a one. Do you remember when Tyreke was at Memphis? They put him in as a point guard and made him a point guard. That didn’t seem quite to be his natural position, although it worked quite nicely for them. And of course he’s had a great career and he was the Rookie of the Year. But we would have had Curry No. 2. It would have been a race between he and Harden, but I would have been leaning in that direction. We never felt we had to face that scenario because we really thought Harden would be gone and we weren’t at No. 3 anyway so we’re talking about things that weren’t very plausible.

NBA.com: What did you think the chances were that Steph would be there at seven?

LR: I really thought he would be gone. Jonny Flynn saved the day when Minnesota picked him. It was hard to read what was going on in Minnesota and therefore I wasn’t quite sure.

We had gotten word the day before the Draft that they actually were going to take Ricky Rubio and Jonny Flynn. I was having trouble believing it, but I did get it from a pretty good source. So the day before the Draft we begin to think, “OK, there is some chance.” Previous to that, I didn’t think so.

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That’s what spurred all of the conversations about trading the No. 7 pick. And there were numerous conversations with various teams. Atlanta finally gave up, because Atlanta wanted Curry, and they knew that if Curry was available we were taking him and we weren’t trading him. I was also talking to Phoenix a great deal. There’s a story in Phoenix that keeps circulating that we actually welched on a deal, which isn’t true and I think Steve Kerr (the Suns' general manager at the time, now Warriors coach) finally addressed that a couple of different times. The reason for continuing those discussions was that the next guy on our board was Jordan Hill and I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that that’s the guy we would end up with, so at that point I would have been comfortable trading the pick. But I was never comfortable trading it if it was Steph Curry.”

NBA.com: Did you have a trade in place if Steph was not available?

LR: I did not.

NBA.com: So it hadn’t gotten to the point where you guys said, “We’ll do this deal with Atlanta if Steph is gone” or “We’ll do this deal with another team if Steph is gone”?

LR: There was nothing in place. What would have happened is we would have had to try to do a Draft-day deal and see if we could get something done. But all that time leading up to that Draft we never got to the point where there was a deal in place, whether Steph was there or he was not there. If he was there it wasn’t an issue because we were keeping him. If he wasn’t there I didn’t have a deal in place, and I was a little bit concerned that we might end up with Jordan Hill.