Stephen Curry, Andrew Bogut Trade 'Killed' by Bucks in 2012 over Ankle Concerns

Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry said Tuesday that the Bucks shut down a potential trade for Golden State Warriors guard Stephen Curry in 2012 before he bought the team.

According to Frank Isola of The Athletic, Lasry laughed off Warriors owner Joe Lacob's assertion three years ago that the Warriors were "light years ahead" of every other NBA team before telling the story of a nixed trade that would have sent Curry to Milwaukee for center Andrew Bogut: 

"I don't know if they can be light years ahead if they traded Steph Curry to the Bucks for Andrew Bogut. That was the deal. But the Bucks' medical staff didn't think Steph's ankle would hold up. That killed the deal. So, I don't know if that’'s being light years. It's luck. And that's fine."

With regard to the medical staff that advised against the deal, Lasry said, "I think we got rid of that medical staff when we bought the team."

In 2017, former Warriors general manager Larry Riley discussed the Bogut trade on SiriusXM NBA Radio (h/t NBC Sports Bay Area).

The deal ended up sending Monta Ellis, Ekpe Udoh and Kwame Brown to Milwaukee for Bogut and Stephen Jackson, but Riley admitted to including Curry's names in talks to get the ball rolling: 

"Absolutely. The only way to get the trade started was to let them start talking about Steph Curry. That's like going fishing, you throw some bait out there. A couple of things happened with that. I wanted to switch the deal over to Monta all along. But in order to get a conversation going, we had to do that."

Riley explained the rationale behind how the deal went down and insisted that he never had any plans to trade Curry for Bogut:

"Well that was also the year Steph was having some ankle problems, and this is just me speaking, you'll have to talk to [then Bucks GM] John Hammond, but they became concerned about Steph's future in regards to ankle problems that he was having.

"So in order to get the deal, we have to put Ekpe Udoh in it. And Ekpe looked like a player that could become a solid NBA backup. In all honestly, we had Ekpe for a year and half and I felt 'Hey, I made a mistake with this one. This guy is not going to make it.' So we had an opportunity to correct a mistake and put him with Monta and get the center back we wanted.

"So there's some credibility to the way that conversation actually started. But at the end of the day, I would have been kicking and screaming and tied down and everything else before I would have let Steph Curry go."

The trade worked out well for Golden State, as Bogut was part of the 2014-15 team that won a championship. Curry won his first of two NBA MVP awards that season, and he remains one of the league's top players.

Now, Milwaukee is the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference at 30-12 thanks largely to the play of MVP candidate Giannis Antetokounmpo.

Since the Warriors are No. 2 in the West, there is a distinct possibility that the teams could meet in the NBA Finals seven years after the Bogut trade went down.