With 12 seconds remaining and the game firmly in hand for the Golden State Warriors, Lester Quinones went up for a worthless layup that Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges – in accordance with what Draymond Green later called a "dumb unwritten rule" that you're not supposed to score at the end of a game that's no longer in question – did not appreciate.
Bridges went up and swatted the ball away. Got called for a goaltend. Had some words and a little shove with Quinones, who was only shooting in the first place because there was a difference between the shot clock and the game clock. And the next thing you knew, a scuffle was breaking out as resident tough guy Grant Williams, whom Charlotte acquired at the trade deadline in a deal with the Mavericks, came running into the fray.
Here's the zoomed-out view:
Here's the zoomed-in view, where you can plainly read the lips of Quinones as he shares some, shall we say, choice words with Williams:
Question: What's with Williams and his penchant for forehead warfare? It's the same way he locked horns with Jimmy Butler in last year's conference finals. Does he think he's some sort of ram?
Anyway, the game ended with Williams waving to the Warriors' bench as he was escorted off the court in a 97-84 win for Golden State, which has now won 10 of its past 12 games. Afterward, Draymond Green, who knows a thing or two about flying off the handle, had some choice words of his own for Williams.
"Grant Williams gotta stop it, man. Being like this tough guy is going absolutely wrong for him," Green said. "Like, he's a really nice guy. For some reason, he keeps trying to jump on the unlikeable side, and I must tell you, it's not always fun over here. And so, I don't know man, he need to figure it out. I mean, talking too much kind of got [Williams] out of Dallas. Like, overdoing it. And he's over there [in Charlotte] talking too much now. He might want to slow down and stop all the tough-guy stuff.
"Pray for Grant Williams," Green said in closing.
Draymond's full comment:
So here's the thing: Green is right about this sore-loser idea that you can't score at the end of a game no longer in question. It is dumb. It's just like not being able to steal in baseball when you're winning by some undefined amount of runs. Please. We're talking about multi-millionaire professionals. There are no orange slices and juice boxes at halftime. If you don't like your opponent scoring when they're already beating the hell out of you, don't let them beat the hell out of you in the first place. Cut the crybaby stuff.
Green is also right about Williams trying too hard to go heel. He was a yapper in Boston, and ESPN's Tim McMahon recently noted that Williams was shipped out of Dallas because he "rubbed a lot of people the wrong way." Williams was a good player in Boston and still has a long NBA career in front of him, but he doesn't have the cache to pull off this act.
That said, the only thing Williams did here is come to the defense of a teammate, even if his teammate was in the wrong, and it's certainly ironic that Draymond Green would be the one to school someone else on the finer virtues of NBA etiquette.
You might recall that Green was suspended a little more than three months ago for running into what was a nothing scuffle, which he had nothing to do with, and dragging Rudy Gobert out in a chokehold. Not long after that, he was suspended again, this time indefinitely, for smoking Jusuf Nurkic across the face. This is the same guy who knocked out his own teammate for crying out loud, and he's here to comment on what Williams did wrong in Dallas.
I don't know if Green just can't see the hypocrisy of his words or if he thinks he's standing on some higher ground because he is, in his eyes, a "real" tough guy while Williams is putting on an act, but either way, it's hilarious. Green is the last guy that needs to be telling fellow players to tone down the shenanigans. Give me a break. What we have here is a classic case of right message, wrong messenger.