Green has plenty of reason to be upset for being sent off for a Flagrant 2 foul in the second quarter of the Warriors’ 117-116 victory over the Memphis Grizzlies in Sunday’s first game of the second round. Because what remains in the background is the possibility of punishment if he gets more glaring fouls in the playoffs. In the 4th game of the 2016 NBA Finals against the Cleveland Cavaliers, Green loudly accepted what the NBA called “a retaliation with his hand in the groin” of LeBron James. The Warriors won that game to take a 3-1 lead, but Green was sent off for Game 5 because he had accumulated four obvious points during the playoffs. The Warriors then lost three in a row in a historic collapse that left a 73-game winning streak in the regular season without a championship. Had Green not been ruled out for the 5th game at the Oracle Arena, the Warriors could well have shut down the Cavaliers and changed the course of NBA history – as Kevin Durant probably would not have signed with the Warriors in the next offseason. Which brings Green to today. Green recorded an “emergency” podcast of the Draymond Green Show from his Memphis hotel room after the game, where he tried to explain why the referees fired him for a foul on Brandon Clark that many in the NBA world believed should not be . guarantees a Flagrant 2. But Green also mentioned the fact that he now has two glaring foul points because it was a foul by Flagrant 2 (Flagrant 1’s foul ends in a blatant foul). Two more points lead to an automatic interruption of a game and there will be an interruption for each subsequent point. “My biggest concern to move forward is that it gives me two glaring foul points, and as we know I have been sent off due to the accumulation of blatant foul points,” Green said. “So I hope that the right thing will happen and that at least it will be canceled outright.” At the end of the podcast, Green announced his statement: “I look forward to it being canceled.” Even canceling a foul on a Flagrant 1 would be huge for Green, because he would have to collect three more flagrants on Flagrant 1 before the suspension or he could even get another Flagrant 2 and be fine. Now, however, he has to go through the rest of the playoffs without getting another Flagrant 2, and he has less room to commit a foul in general in case the referees call it blatant. The Warriors may have won Game 1, but they have a long way to go for a possible championship. They need Green on the pitch to get them there, and having experienced the chaos after the 2016 season, Green certainly knows that too.
