David Lee had to laugh. Where did the time go?

It has been 10 years since Lee was named an All-Star as a member of the Golden State Warriors.

“God, that’s crazy,” Lee said in a recent conversation from his South Florida home.

For the Warriors and their fans, it’s an anniversary worth celebrating. Not only did Lee become the organization’s first All-Star since Latrell Sprewell, ending a 16-year drought, but his selection was also at the root of the Warriors’ dynasty.

Now it’s news if the Warriors go unrepresented at All-Star weekend. It has happened only once in the last 10 years, in 2020, the season they played without Steph Curry and Klay Thompson and went 15-50. Twice they’ve had four players at the All Star Game. Three times they’ve sent three. In all, 22 All-Star selections since 2013.

“The year that I made the All-Star Game, 2013,” Lee said, “we finally started to gain some traction. We went from being a team that everybody was beating up on to (a team) earning respect.”

Lee, a 27-year-old entering his prime, came to the Warriors in a 2010 trade that sent Kelenna Azubuike, Anthony Randolph, Ronny Turiaf and two second-round draft picks to the Knicks. A product of the St. Louis suburbs who played collegiately at Florida, Lee was in a strange land. None of his friends knew where the Warriors played — “I know it’s in California ... right?” they’d ask.

Lee was coming off an All-Star season in which he averaged 20.2 points and 11.7 rebounds for the Knicks. He was an unrestricted free agent and the Knicks, seeking to land Lebron James in free agency, did a sign-and-trade with the Warriors on July 9. The following week, Joe Lacob and Peter Guber bought the team, hired Mark Jackson as head coach and the seeds of change were planted.

The Warriors were still a laughingstock. Lee recalls the time a Los Angeles Lakers assistant coach giggled at them during pre-game warm-ups at Oracle Arena. The Lakers had Kobe Bryant surrounded by a huge front of Pau Gasol, Andrew Bynum and Lamar Odom, no match for Warriors’ bigs Lee and Andrew Bogut.

“He looked at Andrew Bogut and I, laughed and said, ‘We’re gonna have fun tonight with this team,” Lee said.

Soon they would show the world they weren’t the same old joke. The Warriors started the 2012-13 season at 22-10 with Lee leading the way. He was averaging 19.5 points and 10.9 rebounds before the All-Star break, the face of a burgeoning team and the veteran for a young group of players preparing for their first taste of the postseason.

Lee made success feel possible to a team that had made the playoffs just once in 19 years.

“He made it all realistic to us,” said Draymond Green, a rookie that season. “D-Lee is an All Star. What do we need to do to get there?”

Curry made it the next year, the first of his nine All Star seasons. Thompson broke through the following season, Green the season after that.

“I remember giving the interview when I made All-Star and saying, ‘I really feel bad for my teammate Steph because I feel like we both should have made it,” Lee said. “You look at it now and you think, ‘David, you should be worried about yourself trying to make another one.’”

He never did. His career was derailed by a hamstring injury at the start of the 2015 season, the one that ended with the first championship. Those playoffs also were the beginning of the end of Lee’s career.

That hit him minutes before the Warriors tipped off against the New Orleans Pelicans in the first round of the 2015 playoffs. Green caught a glimpse of himself on the Jumbotron playoff poster, posed next to Curry and Thompson and sprinted toward Lee, beaming with pride.

“Big bro. Guess what? They put me up with Steph and Klay on the pregame poster,” Green said. “How cool is that?”

Lee laughed.

“Draymond, they took me off the poster and put you on,” he said.

The smile fell from Green’s face and he apologized until Lee assured him it was OK.

“We were crying on the court we laughed so hard,” Lee said.

“It was a real lighthearted moment,” Green said.

It was a moment that testified to Lee’s character. He was the team’s highest-paid player. He was coming off a season in which he’d averaged 18.2 points and 9.3 rebounds. But his injury in the last game of the preseason had caused him to miss 24 of the first 25 games, clearing the way for Green to start.

Lee watched from the bench as the team became a powerhouse with Green on the court, going 22-3 over those 25 games. When Lee was cleared to play, head coach Steve Kerr pulled him aside.

“I know you’re really eager to get back in there and this starting lineup. But what do you think about what we’re doing now?’” Kerr said then.

“Coach, I’ve had a chance to do everything individually that I’m probably capable of doing in the game of basketball. I’ve been an All-Star twice,” Lee replied. “If we have a chance to win a championship, you play me how you think we can best win.”

Green started those playoff games, and the ‘death lineup’ with him, Andre Iguodala, Curry, Thompson and Harrison Barnes not only helped secure the Warriors’ first NBA title since 1975, but ushered in a small-ball phenomenon.

“If I would have put my foot down and said, ‘Hey, I’m the highest paid guy on the team, I deserve to play, and who is this Draymond?’, maybe things would have gone differently,” Lee said. “I would not have been capable of doing that early in my career. Putting my ego in my back pocket and saying let’s do this for the team.”

As Lee’s starts dwindled, so did his minutes and numbers. The city celebrated its historic title and pragmatism set in: Green was the future, along with Curry and Thompson. In July of 2015, five years after he’d come to Golden State, Lee was traded to the Boston Celtics for Gerald Wallace and Chris Babb. It was a salary dump; neither of them ever suited up for the Warriors.

Lee played in only 30 games for Boston, then 25 in Dallas. After 79 games with San Antonio in 2016-17, he was done. At 33, he retired.

Even in his absence, Lee played a part in the Warriors next three championships.

“The way he accepted no longer starting, no longer being the guy and supporting and boosting us getting to that space in our career, we knew what it’s supposed to look like,” Green said. “As all of us start to get older in this league, we know how to act and how it should be handled. It’s in large part due to how he handled things when we were 23, 24 years old.”

Lee didn’t watch last year’s NBA Finals. Not because of any lingering bitterness or lack of interest. It was just inconvenient.

Games air at 3 a.m. in Monaco, where he spends his summers with his wife, tennis star Caroline Wozniacki, and their two young children. He learned that the Warriors had won another title via ESPN alert the next morning.

He was rooting for Jayson Tatum to have a great series — they were high school teammates — but for the Warriors to win it.

After all he’d been through with them, he had a feeling they would.

It’s why he can look at the Warriors’ middling record now, without a healthy All-Star, and feel confident. In a copy-cat league, he still sees the trailblazing core that his sacrifice helped build as the ones to beat.

“I wouldn’t want to be the team facing them in the playoffs when you have Steph, Klay, Draymond and the winning mentality,” Lee said. “I wouldn’t want to be the team to face them.”

Staff writer Madeline Kenney contributed to this report.