Draymond Green throwing Rudy Gobert in a sleeper hold and earning a 5-game suspension for it became the talking point around the NBA, as players, fans, and even SNL all had something to say about what did and didn’t happen in the scuffle between the Warriors and Wolves.
The player perspective on those types of things is always the most interesting to me, particularly because there’s not really a unified belief among current and former players about how those types of fights should go, and we saw that across the various player podcasts this week. Patrick Beverley got mad about Karl-Anthony Towns not jumping in and choking Draymond back, while Paul George noted that star players have to toe a certain line because they can’t risk getting ejected or suspended and costing their team a game in that situation.
On Jeff Teague’s Club 520 Podcast, his co-host Bishop had a different question he wanted an answer for: Why are NBA players like this? When Teague asked who he was talking about he brought up Jeff shoving LeBron James into the stands at the end of a Hawks-Cavs playoff game back in 2016, which led to a very funny answer from Teague.
Jeff Teague hilariously explains why he pushed LeBron into the crowd at the end of a Playoff game 🤣
Club 520 Podcast | @wellssssssssss pic.twitter.com/hA8UQf6PUg
— Ballislife.com (@Ballislife) November 20, 2023
As Teague notes, he never won a playoff game against LeBron, who regularly tortured the Hawks (along with pretty much every team in the East) for nearly a decade and rather famously snuffed out the best team Atlanta’s had in 2015. Not only that, but as Teague points out, the crowd in Atlanta was often very pro-LeBron — or at least vocally so — meaning they also had to hear the cheers for James beating them in their home building. That pent up frustration manifested itself in a shoulder check that forced Teague to delete his Instagram because of the hate mail he got. He also went on to note his misfortune running into LeBron in the playoffs continued with the Pacers and that once he finally went to the Western Conference, so did James.
Teague is one of the best storytellers in NBA podcasting and is able to make just about anything funny, including IG death threats for shoving LeBron into the crowd.
