Even still, Ellis is fine with all that. Those who remember and appreciate how good he was, what he meant to the organization, they remember. Those who don’t, that’s fine, too. Peace won’t let that bother him. Because he remembers. “Everything, even through my bad times, I still enjoyed it,” Ellis said in a phone interview this week of his time with the Warriors. “Because at the end of the day, they gave me my shot. They took a chance on drafting a high schooler, 152 pounds of out Jackson, Mississippi. … So I was always grateful and thankful for that. It went down the way it went down. I guess that’s part of the business. And it just happened the way it happened. But my whole experience, the time that I was there for seven and a half years, I loved every bit of it.”

When the Warriors drafted Curry, a player just as slight as him, Ellis didn’t think it could work. And he said so, which created controversy. He laughs about it now, that character trait of his that stirred that pot. Ellis doesn’t talk much. But when he does, he says what he believes. And the straight-talking young man from the Dirty South only knew one way to tell it. “I ain’t gon’ lie,” he said over the phone. “I’ve done some things when I was young that bite me in my butt. But it is what it is, a part of life. “Just some people didn’t take, when they ask me an opinion, they didn’t really want to accept the reality of it, the truth. Because, you know, I don’t know how to be fake with nobody.”

He was getting dressed in the visiting locker room at Arco Arena, ready to take on the Kings, when Dominic McGuire broke the news to him. He saw it on the ESPN ticker on the locker room TV. Ellis was traded to Milwaukee. Just like that, he was no longer a Warrior. He was pissed. “Not only so much that they traded me,” Ellis remembered, “just how they went about trading me. If they would’ve traded me and let me know the process of everything that was going down, it would’ve been a whole lot better. I mean, that was a career-changing experience right there. ‘Cause when I went to Milwaukee, it was totally different.”