Game 4 of the 2017 NBA Finals got really, really chippy. Officials handed out 51 total fouls on Friday night, including a number of technicals that were assessed to a handful of players – LeBron James and Kevin Durant got T’d up for jawing with one another, while no one knew exactly why Draymond Green wasn’t tossed for an accumulation of technicals. Oh, and Dahntay Jones decided to spend basically the remainder of this season’s paycheck after picking up a technical foul.
Along with all of this, there was an incident where it looked like Zaza Pachulia might have punched Iman Shumpert below the belt. Basically, the NBA had a lot to review when it went back and looked over the game prior to Monday night’s Game 5.
Sam Amick of USA Today Sports is happy to announce that the league has finished its review, and there will be no additional discipline for anyone that could put their statuses on Monday night into jeopardy.
No extra discipline coming from the NBA based on the Cavs-Warriors plays reviewed from Game 4, I'm told.
— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) June 10, 2017
This is great news because, well, it’s the Finals and it’s weird to watch games without players who are suspended. It would also be a bit ironic if there was some type of punishment which kept someone out of this game, because last year during Game 4 of the Finals, Green made contact with James below the belt, which led to the Warriors’ forward getting suspended for one game.
As Green has said in the past, him sitting out for Game 5 was one of the things that helped spark Cleveland’s eventual title – the Warriors couldn’t get the job done, the Cavs defended their home court in Game 6, and in a one-game series to decide the championship in Game 7, Cleveland was able to grind out a win. We’ll never know if the full-strength Warriors shut the door on the Cavs during Game 5 in 2016 if Green plays, but we do know that no one on either team will be forced to serve a suspension during Game 5 of the 2017 Finals.
