Draymond Green ‘not excited’ about Warriors’ date with play-in tournament

SAN FRANCISCO — The play-in tournament officially awaits the Warriors, who locked their spot in as the Western Conference’s final entrant with Tuesday night’s results.

“It’s not exciting,” Draymond Green reacted, bluntly.

This was hardly news for a team that has more or less known its position for the better part of the close to the regular season. There was a remote possibility that they could jump the Clippers into ninth by winning out, but that was ended by Los Angeles beating the Mavericks.

So, for the fourth time in its seven years, the Warriors are play-in bound. They will have to win two road games against some combination of the Clippers, Trail Blazers and Suns, in order to advance to a first-round matchup with either the Thunder or Spurs.

“I’m a competitor, so I’m gonna do all I can to win, but it’s not all that exciting,” Green continued. “As a competitor, you want to rise to the challenge, but I’m not going to sleep tomorrow night like, ‘Man, we’ve got the play-in next week.’”

The expanded postseason format introduced in 2020-21 is the only reason the Warriors are still alive after going 9-18 without Stephen Curry the past 27 games. Still, Green said, “it ain’t working.” The idea was to encourage more teams to compete to the end of the regular season.

“I think it worked initially,” Green said. “And now, to have a team stuck in 10th, it ain’t working. We could’ve lost our last 15 games and been stuck in 10th. … The play-in came about to make teams maybe through 12 or 13 keep going. They ain’t keep going (this season). They kind of slowed down. And then they hit the brakes.”

Green spent as much time assessing the pros and cons of the play-in as he did the details of Golden State’s 110-105 win over the Kings, and who could blame him? Sacramento and four other teams below the Warriors clearly weren’t incentivized to try for the No. 10 seed.

There was so little at stake, or at least so little reason for the Kings to want to win, that they intentionally fouled Seth Curry — an 86.4% free-throw shooter — down by 3 with 1:39 to go.

Asked for his solution to the NBA’s tanking problem, Green gave it some thought and suggested more punishments such as the respective fines the league dolled out to the Jazz ($500,000) and Pacers ($100,000) for their actions earlier this year.

“I get fined when I do wrong, so just fine the hell out of them,” Green said. “We love taking money from players. Keep fining the teams. I’ve seen two fines. And we all know everybody’s tanking. But you’ve seen two fines. If it was players, they’d snatch that money in a heartbeat.”

The league has been divided into two groups: teams trying to win and teams trying to lose. The Warriors have been buried at the bottom of the first bucket for most of the past two months, now, giving little meaning to the outcome Tuesday or any game of late, really.

They’ve had a reason to care about the product on the court the past two games: It’s the beginning of a short window to get Curry and their other injured players reacclimated and reintegrated before the games begin to matter again.

Curry came out of his second game back from a knee injury healthy and with 17 points in 25 minutes. But he was largely quiet in the second half, and Kerr said he looked “a little rusty,” while calling out his responsibility for three of the Warriors’ 11 third-quarter turnovers.

“Steph was part of that with a couple poor decisions … he knows he had a little bit of a ragged game handling the ball,” Kerr said. “The second game back, to me, is always harder than the first. When you’re coming back, the first one, you get that adrenaline, and I think the other night, it was such a high-level game, and tonight, I felt like there was a little bit of a letdown for the whole team.”

The Warriors lost another chance to learn how they want to use Curry with Kristaps Porzingis, who was ruled out with knee soreness, along with Al Horford (calf), Quinten Post (foot), Gui Santos (pelvis) and Will Richard (back). The big man brought in at the trade deadline fouled out of Curry’s return, so the duo has only shared the court for eight minutes. 

Perhaps the biggest thing the Warriors can take away from the win is confidence in De’Anthony Melton, who played his best game in nearly a month.

“I just wanted to figure out a way to get out of this slump,” Melton said after a 21-point effort in 29 minutes, his highest scoring output since March 16. He missed two of the 10 games since, averaging just 8.0 points per game on 30% shooting from the field — 23.1% from 3.

Curry’s return has opened up the floor for everyone, but especially his backcourt partner. Melton also said a thumb injury that made it painful to dribble or catch the basketball has healed.

“That’s the biggest thing I think,” he said. “It was just lingering with me a little longer than I liked (and) kind of started to mess with my mental a little bit, feeling confident out there. 

“My body’s started to recover better and I’m starting to feel a lot better than I did. Those types of things matter.”

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