NBA fans, players and pundits have taken turns this week dissecting Draymond Green’s indefinite suspension after he struck Jusuf Nurkić in the face during the Warriors’ loss to the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night.
The most recent player to discuss the incident happens to be one of Green’s past targets: Minnesota Timberwolves big man Rudy Gobert.
“I have empathy for him,” Gobert told ESPN after the Timberwolves’ 119-101 win over the Dallas Mavericks on Thursday night. “You see somebody that’s not well inside and suffering. You take away the game and all that, and you want somebody to be well and be able to do what we do every night and compete and be happy.”
Gobert understands how Nurkić feels, as the 7-foot-1 center had a similar on-court encounter with Green not too long ago.
After Klay Thompson and Jaden McDaniels got into a heated scuffle just 100 seconds into Golden State’s Nov. 14 loss to Minnesota, Gobert tried to pull Thompson away before he was put into a chokehold by Green and dragged across the court for several seconds.
Green, Thompson and McDaniels all were ejected from the game, and the NBA later suspended Green for five games for his part in the altercation.
Green said in a recent interview with ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne that he watched video of the Gobert incident on his phone, and immediately was taken aback by his actions.
“When I watched it back, I said, ‘Damn, I held him much longer than I realized in that moment,’ ” Green told Shelburne. “But the reality is, in those moments, you don’t know what time is. You don’t have a sense of time.”
Roughly one month after the Gobert incident, after committing to the team and promising to be better, Green found himself back in the same position. This time, it was in the third quarter of Tuesday’s game against the Suns and came during an inbounds play on which Green believed Nurkić was holding his waist, so he swung around to sell a foul call but instead struck Nurkić in the face.
The result was an indefinite suspension by the NBA, which didn’t want to put a number on the suspension because league officials want Green to take as much time as he needs to get himself right before returning to the court.
“I’m not sure what that really means, so it’s hard to tell,” Gobert said on the suspension being indefinite. “I mean, you don’t want someone to get badly hurt. You’ve got to fix that. That’s it.”
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