Amick: Have Draymond Green and these Warriors reached the tipping point?

He kept talking about the carry.

This was Draymond Green’s first game back from his five-game suspension, with the Golden State Warriors forward completing his league-mandated discipline by dragging Rudy Gobert across the court as if he were playing hoops on a WWE stage. He was 13 months removed from the infamous Jordan Poole punch, six months removed from Domantas Sabonis’ foot stomp and two weeks removed from Jusuf Nurkić’s swinging punch against the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night that led to the NBA issuing him a suspended indefinitely the next day. . And Green, whose struggling Warriors had led the Sacramento Kings for almost the entire rematch of playoff opponents on Nov. 28, was once again consumed by his own intensity.

No matter what was happening around him, Green kept going on about how Malik Monk had held the ball with his hand as he came off the floor and — like so many thousands of NBA players before him — wasn’t penalized. He replayed Monk’s carry in dramatic form for the officials — the same one he’d been chewing on for nearly a minute when a Trey Lyles elbow wasn’t called and forced Green to flop — and drew a technical foul on Mitchell Ervin that called the ball turned over. energy in the building. But that didn’t stop Green from continuing.

After Green was taken out of the game seconds later, he told Warriors coach Steve Kerr everything about what Monk had done. He continued his anti-carrying crusade on the bench, where Green engaged in a spirited shouting match with player development coach Anthony Vereen that actually pointed the finger in Green’s direction and was so tense that Jonathan Kuminga and several others decided to take on the role of peacemakers to play. . Meanwhile, a Kings comeback unfolded after trailing by 24 points on the floor. The frustration on the faces of several Warriors nearby, including Klay Thompson, was clearly visible. And with good reason.

Then again, as has been the case so often lately, Green was seemingly obsessed with the micro rather than the macro. With the game, the season and the back of their legendary dynasty on the line, Green became so emotionally distraught that he forgot to think about the long-term consequences of his actions. The more surprising part, and what seemed to leave the door wide open for future incidents, was that Green felt so comfortable with this level of perk, as the kids say, even after the two ejections and the five-match suspension that had already made life unnecessarily difficult for his team this season.

“The Warriors … have to keep their poise and play basketball,” TNT announcer Stan Van Gundy had said on the broadcast during that stretch, which led to the Kings’ 124-123 victory.

By ‘Warriors’ he of course meant Green. And what they really need, with the February 8 trade deadline looming, is to finally start answering the tough questions that everyone inside the Chase Center seems to want to ignore.

Where is this all going? And with a $400 million payroll (including luxury taxes) hanging over their heads, when would Warriors owner Joe Lacob decide it’s time for a major change? As one front-office executive put it in the wake of Green’s leveling of Nurkić, “I can imagine some reassessments (taking place now).”

But if winning titles is the end goal for all of them – and it is – then the uncomfortable truth is that this respected group of future Hall of Famers seems incapable of getting anywhere close. They are getting beaten most nights, having lost 12 of their last 17 after starting 5-1. They look broken in ways that go far beyond the box score, with a litany of late-game situations having gone south during this brutal start. They look… cooked.

Everyone except Chef Curry, of course. And that’s just not enough.

Steph is still Steph, 35 years old and all. But the 33-year-old Thompson, whose looming free agency has created a new stress point after he and the Warriors failed to agree on an extension, is having his worst year in more than a decade on both sides of the rankings. The 33-year-old Green, who was signed to a four-year, $100 million contract in the summer, can still play at a high level but is still a problem because (see above).

The production of Andrew Wiggins, whose renaissance was such a key factor in their 2022 title run, has dropped dramatically across the board. And how does this add to the uncertainty: You have a coach in Kerr whose contract expires after this season and a general manager in Mike Dunleavy Jr., who in his first season is filling the huge shoes left by the departed Bob Myers.

Everywhere I go these days there are human reminders of how much the Warriors world has changed. You’ll now see Myers on the media side as an ESPN analyst, the retired Andre Iguodala leading the players’ union as executive director and former Warriors player/front office executive Shaun Livingston joining his old teammate in the NBPA. These are all people who got through to Groen in the past, men whose credibility came in handy on the many occasions when a Green-inspired crisis would inevitably break out.

That matters, of course, because it’s the absence of a calming effect that could force these Warriors to make tough decisions sooner than they’d hoped. It’s hard to keep trudging forward when the coals are so hot under your feet. You could see that dynamic play in real time in the Sacramento game, where it was so clear that no one on this team — including Steph — could convince Green to shift his energy in a more positive direction for the sake of safety. Greater good.

We’ll never know what would have happened if the Warriors had taken a harder line on Green in recent years, especially after the Poole punch two October ago. He was never suspended for that ugly act, as the Warriors instead decided to fine him, while greenlighting a short sabbatical that ended just in time for the start of the regular season. The league, which in that case showed respect for the Warriors’ celebrated culture and opted to let the organization handle the situation, remained on the sidelines.

In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake. A soft precedent was set, and the Warriors would later reaffirm their loyalty to Green by re-signing him last summer, not long before trading Poole to the Washington Wizards (in the three-team deal that netted them Chris Paul).

But it no longer matters how they got here. The frequency of incidents involving Green, and the near-constant tension for everyone involved, makes it difficult to imagine this group facing the retirement sunset together.

Not for this price. Not with these goals. And especially not if Green single-handedly sabotages their twilight years in this way.

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(Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)