Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue was short on questions about his decisions and whether he played James too many minutes, and he griped about his best player not getting whistles.
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The play in review occurred with less than three minutes of Game 4 when both James and Green got intertwined.
Green now faces punishment based off of his track record throughout the playoffs and the finals combined.
James wasn’t expecting Green to be disciplined and said he was just waiting to see how the National Basketball Association would handle the situation. Green, who has a history of flailing arms and legs, flailed his arm as he was trying to get up and struck James in the groin.
Both Green and teammate Shaun Livingston said then interpretations of flagrant fouls are so inconsistent that it’s impossible to know where the line is drawn.
I also found myself wondering if this isn’t also the end of the LeBron James-Kevin Love-Kyrie Irving version of the Cavs. I’m all cool with the competition. “I’m all fine with that, but some of the words that came out of his mouth were a little bit overboard, and being a guy with pride, a guy with three kids and a family, things of that nature, some things just go overboard”. James lobbied for the league to suspend Green for Game 5 for hitting James below the belt.
“Although seemingly disrespectful, the Warriors power forward explained his side saying, “[James] stepped over me and I felt like that was disrespectful. “I’m not going to comment on what Klay said, because I know where it can go from this sit-in”. We had our words, it is what it is.
“If you can’t get up for that there’s something wrong with you”, Thompson said. No team has ever come back from a 3-1 deficit to win the finals. His performances have been consistent this finals series providing salvation for the surprisingly misfiring duo of Klay Thompson and back to back MVP Stephen Curry.
Because of his earlier flagrant foul toward Steven Adams in the playoffs, his tally keeps adding up. He was suspended because he was retroactively given a flagrant 1, and that gave him enough flagrant points to trigger an automatic one-game suspension.
Is that Green action alone deserving of a suspension? No. “They just pull out a ping-pong ball and make a decision”. Move on. I’m not going to sit there and argue with him.
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“We got tangled up; it is what it is”, Green said in a separate post-game interview with ESPN Radio. But if you ask the Warriors, specifically center Andrew Bogut, the Cavaliers worked an underhanded scheme to get Green suspended. “If we need someone to bark at us and get us motivated for Game 5 of the NBA Finals with a chance to win the championship, we probably shouldn’t be playing”.
