Colin Cowherd on Draymond Green Punching Jordan Poole: Not That Rare, Happens A Lot

The Golden State Warriors have decided to keep their hand of discipline light and merely fined Draymond Green for slugging Jordan Poole. As my coworker Stephen Douglas wrote this morning, a suspension wouldn't have fixed anything but only dishing out a fine reflects how seriously the Warriors take a teammate-on-teammate assault. Which is to say, not very much at all. The fact that Steve Kerr was openly more angry and concerned about who leaked the video rather than Green's fist connecting with Poole's jaw only reinforces that viewpoint.

Colin Cowherd talked about the punishment meted out to Green on The Herd today and clearly planted his flag in the school of thought that this is just dudes being guys, competitors being competitors, and really there's nothing to worry about because it happens all the time. It would be appropriate to note at this juncture that The Draymond Green Show is distributed through Cowherd's podcast network.

Cowherd's only solid point here is that comparing the Warriors workplace to an office is a useless exercise. Completely agree on that front. But the rest of this monologue makes a blogger feel like he's on crazy pills. It is not rare or outrageous for professional athletes to get in each other's faces in the heat of the moment, even if they are teammates. It is quite rare and even more outrageous for a player to punch his own teammate in the face!

You don't believe me? Here's Patrick Beverley, a guy who a lot of teammates probably wanted to punch in the face at one point or another, telling the audience of his podcast that he's never seen teammates get into a fistfight. Beverley probably knows a bit more about this sort of thing than both me and Cowherd.

"We're professionals. That's the line you don't cross." And yet Cowherd still argues this isn't that crazy!

It's just ridiculous. All of it. I'm not out here calling for Green to get banned from the NBA for life but I don't understand how anybody can sit here and accept the spinzone coming from the Warriors and, apparently, Cowherd that a 32-year-old punching a 23-year-old teammate in the mouth is not a bad thing! And Green should probably have to do more than pay out a very small percentage of his paycheck to make up for it! Impossibly it feels like I am the one spewing the hot take here.

But surely nothing bad will come out of the Warriors publicly downplaying a superstar slugging a teammate.