Draymond Green complains about unfair treatment because the NBA did not suspend Jamal Murray

The NBA’s decision to fine Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray rather than suspend him for throwing a heating pad onto the court during a live game ultimately didn’t matter much.

Murray was benched during his team’s Game 2 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves and was fined $100,000. Had he been suspended, the Nuggets might have dropped out of Game 3, putting the defending champions in a 3-0 hole that no NBA team has ever come out of to win. Instead, he played in and helped win Game 3, but Denver ultimately fell in seven games.

Regardless of the outcome, Draymond Green is not happy with the proceedings and believes things would have turned out very differently if he had been the one to throw things on the court.

The Golden State Warriors forward appeared on Shaquille O’Neal’s podcast and announced that if he had thrown a heating pad onto the field, he would have been suspended for the remainder of the playoffs. He then complained that the lockout periods were frustratingly inconsistent.

“I would have been suspended for the rest of the playoffs for sure,” Green said.

“The problem I often have with suspensions and other things is that you don’t know what it is,” he continued. “Sometimes it’s here, sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s in between. It just moves. There is no sentence: ‘You do this, you get that. You do that, you get that.’ It is everywhere.

“I think it’s absolutely crazy that you get a $100,000 fine, no suspension, nothing, just for throwing a heat pack at an officer. Man, I say one word to an officer and they throw me in jail!”

Green’s comparisons to his own suspension during the 2016 NBA Finals aren’t entirely accurate. The NBA often waffles on what constitutes a suspension, but the league has never taken a stand on calling flagrant fouls when players get too physical with each other. There’s a clearly delineated line in that regard, and Green crossed it by hitting LeBron James (intentionally, as he admits in this video) and was subsequently rightfully given a flagrant foul. Which then forced the NBA to suspend him for committing too many flagrant fouls earlier in the playoffs. It’s hard to place much of the blame on the league for Green getting too much flagrant abuse, isn’t it?

However, his frustration with the inconsistency of suspensions is entirely valid and is not only felt by the players. Murray definitely should have been suspended. He threw something at a referee because he was angry about bad calls. The fact that the league chose to fine him instead is puzzling, especially given the NBA’s ongoing efforts to set a precedent that referees must be treated with the utmost respect at all times.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter because the Warriors didn’t make it past the play-in tournament and he wasn’t able to push the boundaries of what’s allowed, as is his wont. But Green probably shouldn’t be too outraged at the idea that he, a player who was suspended indefinitely for his violence against another player this season, is being treated differently than everyone else.