The Draymond Green Foul, Or The Power Of The Junk

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So today in the NBA, the most viewed crotch shot this side of a screwy WWE finish played out with Golden State PF Draymond Green getting his flagrant 1 upgraded to a flagrant 2 with a $25K fine... but Green avoids suspension, at least for now. (He's racked up enough sin moments that his next flagrant will come with a one game suspension.)

A few thoughts about this:

1) If I'm Thunder HC Billy Donovan, I make it a not small part of my game plan in Game Four to try to bait Green into further ref attention. Send a benchie out to flop at him, tell C Stephen Adams (not exactly inexperienced at irritating the opposition) there's a bonus in it for him, make sure bigger stars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook know that Green and his hothead nature is on the white board. Add this to the howling rage that the OKC crowd will likely bring to the fore every time he touches the ball, and there's a very good chance that the Thunder can go for the kill in five. In the NBA playoffs, you close as soon as you can, because every game is its own world, and choking the life out of a team needs to happen every chance you can take it. (And if you need any convincing on that, consider the Cavs now having to play at least six games against Toronto, with 46 minutes of LeBron James doing everything he can tonight to try to avoid that.)

2) The flailing move that Green did before the injury is something he's done literally dozens of times this season, which really cuts down on the idea that there was intent to this. So was the context of the game, in that it wasn't a runaway when it happened. Compare and contrast this with the final moments of the Cavs-Raptors Game 3, and you get why the NBA didn't go for suspension. Correctly. If they wanted to toss him out of the earlier game, it wouldn't have changed anything. OKC was playing it's A game, GSW was throwing an D, and Green was an F. Moving on.

3) In case you've thought that the society has changed dramatically from moments of Male Privilege... um, we just spent 24 hours of video looking at a nut shot. A nut shot that seems to have taken the full measure of sanity from all kinds of people on Twitter and the World Wide Lemur... as if taking the shot there, as bad and wince-tastic as it is, is any worse that getting spiked in the knees, or having your ankle rolled.

Here's how "bad" that hit was... Adams played. The rest of the game. Played pretty well, too, unlike Green, who might have had his worst game of the year. I get that we're dealing with taboos here and no one wants to see something like that, let alone for it to become a common occurrence. But FFS, people, it's as if no one ever got hit there before, or that one of the top 10 players in the NBA is now going to be defined by this single moment.

It's not. He's better than that. The series would have been changed, fairly irrevocably, by taking Green out of the mix for Game Four. If the series goes long enough, and there are great games later, no one's really going to remember this.

And seeing if he can bounce back in that setting, with all of Oklahoma howling for his head?

Is going to be *fascinating*...