Warriors’ Draymond Green says game against Clippers was too ‘nice’

Draymond Green

Draymond Green of Golden State said Thursday’s game against the Clippers was too nice/Photo courtesy of Golden State Warriors, NBA.com

 

There were a couple of times during the Clippers’ 100-86 Christmas night victory over the visiting Golden State Warriors where the teams engaged in a bit of extracurricular  warfare. For example, Blake Griffin and the Warriors’ David Lee had a brief shoving match. And Chris Paul and Golden State’s Draymond Green talked a bit of trash to each other.

But there wasn’t enough of the mutual hate, according to Green.

“There are some guys on that team I really respect,” Green said. “But as far as that fire, that dog … I mean, it’s no secret that we don’t like them. And it’s no secret that they don’t like us. So I don’t know why the game was that nice. We’re trying to act like we like each other, and we don’t. It was a boring game.”

David Lee had a terrific game for the Warriors in win over Clippers

With all the talk about Warriors guards Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson and their 3-point efficiency ahead of Saturday’s Western Conference playoff opener, the two didn’t even have real good games in their 109-105 victory over the Clippers.

Curry scored 14 points on 6 of 16 shooting and Thompson had 22 points on 7 of 20 from the field.

Power forward David Lee, however, perhaps was his team’s best player. He scored 20 points on 8 of 13 shooting and pulled down 13 rebounds.
“Well, I got off to (a bit) of a slow start really because of getting hurt last year, this is really my first playoff game tonight,” Lee said post-game. “So I got off to a bit of a slow start and once again, just like our team, I just tried to be resilient and the guys told me to keep being aggressive. The second half, found a better rhythm and when the shot-blockers came, I thought we did a pretty good job with interior passing and getting a lot of easy buckets in the paint through that.”

The Warriors had 48 points in the paint, the Clippers 42. Golden State absolutely did have some nifty passing in the paint that led to easy layups.