Klay Thompson is not quite champing at the bit to come back to the Golden State Warriors' starting lineup, knowing he has a demanding road back to full health after suffering a torn ACL in Game 6 of the NBA Finals. The sharpshooter has researched how long it has taken other athletes to recover from this injury, ranging from Zach LaVine and Danilo Gallinari in the NBA to Tom Brady and Adrian Peterson in the NFL.

Known as an iron man in his own locker room, Thompson is now limited to watching games on the couch and doing physical therapy to regain strength in his joints after going down with this injury at the most untimely of occasions:

“My mindset, though, I’m still in like the grassroots stages of rehab,” Thompson told Marcus Thompson II of The Athletic. “So it’s, like, hard to envision even, like, running. I’ll watch games on Hardwood Classic and it’s like, ‘Damn. I was able to do that?’ because of my knee right now. But I’ll get back. I’ll be even better. I really believe that. I’ve never been more motivated.”

However, Thompson knows the biggest mental hurdle is still yet to come, as it's easy to focus on rehab when there is no immediate urgency. That will all change once he's present for part of training camp and the preseason:

“Honestly, we’ll see in two weeks when I see my teammates out there playing,” said Thompson, weighing how rehab will affect him mentally. “But, as of right now, it’s easy to lock in and focus on my rehab every day because that’s all I have. I don’t have games. I don’t have to go to the arena. But when that starts, I know it’s going to be a very tough challenge. It’s going to be really hard.”

Thompson got a third-person experience with this by seeing former teammate DeMarcus Cousins waiting on the sidelines for the bulk of the 2018-19 season after coming back from an Achilles injury. If Thompson can come back in February or March, it will put him on an eight-to-nine-month window of recovery, which is among the fastest timelines for a player coming back from an ACL tear.