The Warriors have decided they’re not going to let the Kristaps Porzingis situation hang over them any longer.
Golden State is withholding payments to Porzingis tied to his absence because of an undisclosed illness, but Draymond Green said after Thursday’s game that the team has already shifted its focus to the players in the room. The Warriors have won six straight after opening 0-3, and Green made it clear the mood inside the locker room has moved on.
“Since I’ve been here on this team, it’s never been about bickering, never about ‘Shame on this guy,’ ‘Shame on that guy,’” Green said. “We’ve never had that culture here.
So the same goes for (Porziņgis). No one’s sitting around bashing this guy or even worried about him, for that matter.
In our minds, we’ve moved forward with the players that we have here. (Does) everyone in here think he can help us?
Of course. We know what type of player he is.
But I don’t think anyone in here is sitting around waiting on him to walk through that door. Everybody’s moved on in their mindset.”
Green also said the front office hasn’t given the players much detail, beyond general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. telling them to stay locked in on the games and let management sort out the rest. That has fed into the team’s “next man up” approach, with Green pointing to Charles Bassey and Graham Ike as the kinds of players who can benefit from the extra opportunity.
“It’s a next man up mentality, right? That’s an opportunity for (26-year-old journeyman) Charles Bassey.
That’s opportunity for (undrafted rookie) Graham Ike to get more minutes and continue to try to elevate his career,” Green added. “So you embrace those guys, and you pour into those guys, to try to help them with all that they can be helped with so that they could ultimately help this team.
But you can’t sit and worry about spoiled milk.”
Klay Thompson, meanwhile, watched the Warriors from the other side on Thursday for the first time since joining the Heat, and he came away believing Golden State is still built to make noise in the playoff race. In Ron Kroichick’s subscriber-only story for The San Francisco Chronicle, Thompson said the Warriors’ structure gives them a real shot.
“They have a system in place that has been successful since Steve (Kerr) became the head coach,” Thompson said. “Never count them out, especially with (Stephen Curry) and Draymond out there and then Jimmy (Butler) and Moses (Moody) coming back. Strength in numbers has always been their mantra, and I think they’ll be a force in the West.”
Brandon Williams also had a reason the Warriors made sense for him. On the Dubs Talk podcast, he said the presence of De’Anthony Melton, his former high school teammate, helped make the decision easier. Dylan Grausz of NBC Sports Bay Area reported Williams’ comments, and Williams described how the two kept talking through free agency before the deal came together.
“It’s crazy, I was telling him about how I should go through free agency and what I should expect,” Williams said. “But we didn’t know that it was going to happen.
Because we played a game every day, we talked probably too much. But I want to say the second week of free agency.
That’s when I started to get a good glimpse. I didn’t tell him initially when I got the call.
But a couple of days later, when I started to feel like it was going to happen, I’m like, ‘Hey bro, it might happen.’ It was kind of cool.”
And in a separate look at the mental side of sports, Elise Devlin of The Athletic wrote about how Curry has learned to enjoy his trips to the free throw line, even when a miss shows up now and then.
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