Warriors vs. Hawks: Jonas Jerebko will start for Draymond Green

The Golden State Warriors have announced that Jonas Jerebko will be starting at power forward tonight as the latest in a day full o drama, which is somewhat captured in the team’s inactive.

Unless you’ve decided to completely ignore social media and TV tonight — and more power to you if you have — you’ve probably already heard about what’s going on between Golden State Warriors stars Draymond Green and Kevin Durant.

In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap:

• Daniel Hardee briefly chronicled a few links from the morning about a disagreement between Durant and Green about a botched play during the final moments of regulation. Most of the Golden State of Mind staff pretty much agreed that it was no big deal and that the whole thing would blow over.
• Later this morning, there were multiple reports that the altercation continued into the locker room after game, as Brady Klopfer described just before lunch. Even at that point, most of us were like, “Huh. That’s weird. But surely this is all much ado about nothing.”
• Then this afternoon, the floodgates of reporting broke open and we found out that this hadn’t yet blown over, Green was going to sit out for tonight’s game and eventually that he would be suspended for tonight’s game. We tried to cover that in our afternoon roundtable about the issue that Brady and Duby Dub Dubs put together.

As Poor Man’s Commish of Let’s Go Warriors tweeted earlier this slow drip of news and rumors from national and local media throughout the day makes a lot more sense when you think about it as the setup for a suspension.

Since then, there’s been a ton more details coming out — big and small — that we’ve all been keeping tabs on. And, to put it simply, things seem pretty serious at this point.

First, it’s nearly impossible to think this is somehow unrelated to Durant’s upcoming free agency. Anthony Slater on The Athletic reported this evening that Durant’s free agency was actually somewhat central to the argument as it carried into the locker room.

The disagreement...spilled into a bigger picture and more personal realm: Durant’s free agency, the most sensitive subject currently looming over the franchise.

Green stabbed at it both in the huddle and later in the locker room, apparently doing so viciously enough that the team deemed it necessary to discipline him severely.

Of course, both Myers and Steve Kerr have insisted that this is not about Durant’s free agency.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to disagree with Tim Kawakami’s on this: no matter how much they try to avoid the free agency thing, it seems like this is just the first major public signal that it really is A Thing.

Anyway, with all that’s going on, Kerr declined to say would start tonight in Green’s place. But safe to say we haven’t heard the last of this story.

Feel free to share your thoughts on that game in the comments below. There are hundreds of comments about the Green suspension and disagreement with Durant linked above.