Not-so-Golden State of mind
The defending champs learned L-A-T-E Tuesday that Draymond Green will be suspended for Game 3 against Sacramento ... while history says erasing a 2-0 series deficit is unlikely with or without him
The Golden State Warriors are supposed to be the seen-it-all team of the 2022-23 NBA playoffs.
Never have they seen a predicament like this.
Not since the We Believe Warriors of 2007 — long before Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Draymond Green came together as a trio in 2012-13 — have the NBA’s reigning champions lost the first two games of a playoff series. Until now.
Then, at the highly untraditional time of 11:38 PM ET on Tuesday night, it was announced that Green has indeed been suspended for Thursday’s Game 3 after his late ejection in Game 2 for stomping on Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis chest and reveling in the aftermath like a wrestler. (Good thing I held off on publishing the Tuesday Newsletter Extravaganza just in case there was this sort of late bulletin.)
"The suspension was based in part on Green’s history of unsportsmanlike acts,” read the league’s press release.
So …
The team that has won four championships across the past eight seasons faces even more immediate danger than it anticipated, given that Green is its defensive anchor. This is where I would normally embed the helpful StatMuse tweet — if tweets were allowed to be placed into Substacks like they used to be — noting that the Warriors are a .562 team this season with Green in uniform and a .333 team without him.
How much danger are we talking? With or without Green’s suspension, NBA teams that fall into a 2-0 hole in a best-of-seven series are 26-308 all time, according to WhoWins.com. That computes to a winning percentage of (gulp) .078.
No surprise, then, that the volume is rising sharply on questions about the Warriors' future and the prospect of a serious offseason roster shakeup (and whether it starts with Green’s exit) faster than even the most hopeful Kings fans imagined.
I was convinced that the Warriors, despite their 11-30 road record during the regular season, would win at least one of the first two games in Sacramento against the unseasoned Kings. I bought into the notion that, as long as their three mainstays are still together, we had to factor in the NBA record Golden State holds with at least one road triumph in its last 27 playoff series. Twenty-seven!
But they couldn't manage a split. The Kings have been sharper in both fourth quarters and, despite ranking 24th leaguewide in defensive rating during the regular season, are making Curry work for every point while hounding the Warriors into dreadful (for them) 32.2% shooting overall from 3-point range so far. Don't forget that Mike Brown, until this season, was always known as a defense-first coach. The Kings are executing to their max on D to this point.
I recorded a podcast Monday night with Turner Sports' Chris Haynes that wrapped up before the Kings’ Game 2 triumph, so we couldn't get into the Sacramento/Golden State series there. I urge you to listen, though, as Chris and I go deep on Bucks vs. Heat — and even deeper on Suns vs. Clippers — and share stories about Patrick Beverley, Tyronn Lue and Nicolas Tatum ... as well as a slew of personal tales about attire preferences, high school graduation celebrations, haircut routines and even the state of Chris' own game now that he has crept into his 40s. There's a lot there that you can catch here:
And as always: Please rate, review and subscribe to the pod, which drops twice weekly.
Back to Green: I was also convinced that he would escape suspension in Adam Silver’s oft-forgiving NBA. It strangely took almost every ounce of Tuesday until we got the verdict, even with Silver in attendance in Sacramento for Game 2, but the league office ultimately did deliver the unexpected by ruling Green out of an absolutely must-win game for Golden State. (The Kings then listed Sabonis as questionable for Game 3 with a sternum contusion after midnight ET.)
This, for the record, was Green’s assessment of the Western Conference when he did a podcast with Haynes and me one week before the postseason began:
“I think it is [as] wide open as we've ever seen it before,” Green said. “And that's no cop-out. I'm not just gonna come on here and say the Warriors should be the favorite just because I play with the Warriors. That's not how I roll.
“Do I think the Warriors could win a championship? One hundred percent we believe we can win a championship, but guess what? The Warriors also could have missed the playoffs. That was also a possibility two days ago, you know? …
“Like Klay said, in a seven-game series, I haven't seen anyone beat us healthy. I said that last year [and] I'll say it again: No one has proven that they can do that yet. Until someone proves that they can do that, I'll always believe that it's us. But in saying that, I think it is wide open.”
The Kings are halfway toward proving it with a 2-0 lead that suddenly looks even larger than the digits suggest.
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Late Tuesday … or early Wednesday
After Game 2 of Clippers at Suns, followed by Inside The NBA on TNT, Tuesday will have become Wednesday, meaning that a new episode of Ted Lasso becomes available.
I am thus moved to share this Controversial Opinion after writing a full-length Ted Lasso feature just a few weeks ago: I’m a huge fan of Apple+ releasing these one episode at a time.
What’s your preference?
I have no discipline. Give me an entire new series of Cobra Kai at once on, say, Jan. 1 and I'm going to watch every episode in one sitting even if it destroys my entire sleep schedule for the first few days of a new year.
We had to wait 17-ish months between the end of Ted Lasso Season 2 and the start of Season 3, but I want the Midnight Tuesday anticipation to last as long as it can. This is a 12-episode season, so we have six more weeks after tonight’s (or tomorrow’s) offering to enjoy the newness.
Who’s with me?
Even if you want to do it wrong and wish we got all 12 episodes of Season 3 back on March 15 … let’s discuss.
I’ll start a thread in Substack Chat if there’s enough interest in the topic.
Numbers Game
🏀 10
Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis led the league during the regular season with 12.3 rebounds per game. No American ranked higher in rebounding than New York’s Julius Randle at No. 10.
🏀 6
A record six players averaged at least 30 points per game this season — four of them foreign-born. Philadelphia’s Joel Embiid (Cameroon) led the league for the second successive season at 33.1 PPG, followed by Dallas’ Luka Dončić (Slovenia) at 32.4 PPG, Portland’s Damian Lillard (United States) at 32.2 PPG, Oklahoma City’s Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (Canada) at 31.4 PPG, Milwaukee’s Giannis Antetokounmpo (Greece) at 31.1 PPG and Boston’s Jayson Tatum (United States) at 30.1 PPG.
🏀 28
Golden State’s first-round matchup with Sacramento is the 28th playoff series of Stephen Curry’s career. It’s the first time that the Warriors have ever trailed 2-0 in the Curry Era.
🏀 12
The Warriors have won at least one road game in all 27 of their previous playoff series with Curry on the roster and have won more than one road game in 12 of those 27 series. Golden State dropped the first two games in Sacramento.
🏀 30
Golden State this season became the first team since the 1989-90 Seattle SuperSonics to win at least 30 games at home this season (33-8) and lose at least 30 on the road (11-30), according to research from fellow Substacker Justin Kubatko.
🏀 30
One more from Kubatko: Phoenix’s Kevin Durant this season became just the third player in NBA history to record multiple 50/40/90 shooting seasons, joining Steve Nash (four times) and Larry Bird (twice). The difference: Durant became the first player in league history to record 55/40/90 shooting splits by shooting 56.0% from the field, 40.4% from 3-point range, and 91.9% from the free throw line … albeit in just 47 regular-season games.
🏀 1
Denver holds the West’s No. 1 seed for the first time in its NBA history dating to the 1976-77 season.
🏀 10.5
Portland’s odds of winning the May 16 draft lottery and the ability to pair Victor Wembanyama with All-Star guard Damian Lillard are 10.5% … not far off the best-in-the-league odds shared by Detroit, Houston and San Antonio at 14%.
Dray absolutely had to be suspended. He intentionally tried to injure another player, and then gloated about it to the fans.
It would be a shame if a suspension would cost GS a shot at winning the series, but Green does appear to have brought this upon himself. I’m not close to being a competitive athlete, so I can’t relate, but I just don’t understand how someone as clearly intelligent and apparently committed to winning as Green could put himself and his team in this position - and not for the first time.