Draymond Green's vicious punch to Jordan Poole during a preseason practice on October 5th, 2022 did much more than doom the Golden State Warriors' hopes of repeating as champions.
Days removed from signing a lucrative four-year contract extension, Poole was viewed as a foundational fixture for the Dubs coming off their surprise title run. He wasn't just an indispensable cog at present, but represented the bridge between eras owner Joe Lacob had always dreamed of using to keep his team in contention even after Stephen Curry, Green and Klay Thompson were well past their primes.
Green's connection with Poole's right jaw changed all that, with a subsequent leak of footage of the incident only making matters worse. The punch was no longer just a hush-hush internal problem that threatened to derail the Warriors' season. It had become a national story that drastically altered how Poole, Green and the organization at large was perceived.
Poole hasn't been the same player ever since. A disastrous 2022-23 season with Golden State paved the way—even ignoring ever-fraught locker-room dynamics resulting from the punch—for his trade last summer to the Washington Wizards, with whom he's continued to underwhelm. Green, meanwhile, certainly hasn't avoided his propensity for violent on-court outbursts in the interim, being suspended indefinitely by the NBA in December after striking Jusuf Nurkic in the face following his chokehold of Rudy Gobert.
Could fallout from the punch have gone much differently if Golden State ever identified who in the organization leaked the video? The Warriors' public-facing frustration at the time certainly suggested as much, with leaders like Steve Kerr at times appearing just as miffed by the video getting out as the incident itself.
More than a year-and-a-half since then and almost a full NBA season away from stepping down as the Warriors' general manager, ESPN commentator Bob Myers was asked recently if Golden State ever found out who leaked the video.
“No. Nope. Umm, I think the best I can answer that is, we couldn't pinpoint anybody,” Myers told JJ Redick on The Old Man and the Three. “It wasn't like we found someone and we…We looked! We looked! We tried! Third-party, we couldn't.”
JJ Redick: “Did you ever find out who leaked the [Draymond Green and Jordan Poole tape]?”
Bob Myers: “No… We looked. We tried, a third party, we couldn’t find him.”
(via @OldManAndThree / YT)pic.twitter.com/nbEHpOKX3P
— ClutchPoints (@ClutchPoints) April 6, 2024
Warriors' failed investigation of leak rings hollow
The notion that a billion-dollar enterprise like the Warriors were unable to identify who leaked the video despite turning over every stone doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Even if the “perpetrator” recorded video on their cell phone from official team footage of practice before taking it public, as suggested by Tim Kawakami of The Athletic, rest assured Golden State and its third-party investigators would eventual glean enough intel to get a pretty strong idea of who leaked the footage.
At least as likely as a complete failure of an investigation is the probe turning up evidence that would've made the team look even worse in wake of the punch. What if a front office higher-up exasperated by Green's antics directed the leak? Maybe it was a teammate of Green and Poole's who was similarly frustrated. What if Poole or someone in his circle did it himself? Are we really so naïve to put it past ownership?
What's done is done. All parties have moved on, at least in principle, with Poole a shell of the dynamic playmaker who helped lead the Dubs to a title, Green toeing the line of unacceptable on-court antics and Golden State following another up-and-down regular season set for a do-or-die matchup against the Los Angeles Lakers in the bottom half of the play-in tournament.
The only head that rolled due to Green's punch and the subsequent leak? Poole's, a decision that no doubt had more to do with his damaging play than presence in the locker room. But can those elements really be separated in wake of such public-facing humiliation and internal hesitation to severely punish Green?
“I don't speak on it much,” Poole told ESPN's Ramona Shelburne last May after the Dubs' season ended. “But I will say that … you've got to have a different level of maturity.
“We had a season to play. You're going to have to play with these people in the locker room, and that's why I said maturity is a big thing. What I know for a fact is there aren't many people who would be able to think logically and understand the magnitude of the situation, you know?”
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