Have Draymond Green and Warriors reached the tipping point?

He wouldn’t stop talking about the carry.

It was Draymond Green‘s first game back from his five-game suspension, with the Golden State Warriors forward, his league-mandated discipline for complete Dragging Rudy Gobert the entire court like he’s playing hoops on a WWE stage. He is 13 months removed from the infamous Jordan Poole blow, six months removed from the Domantas Sabonis foot-step and two weeks removed from the Jusuf Nurkić swinging hit against the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night that led to the NBA suspending him indefinitely a day later. And Greenwhose struggle Warriors the led Sacramento Kings for almost all of this Nov. 28 rematch of playoff opponents, was consumed by its own intensity — again.

No matter what happened around him, Green just went on and on about how Malik Monk palmed the ball as he came down to the floor and – like so many thousands of NBA players who came before him — were not punished. He re-enacted Monk’s carry in dramatic form for the officials – the same one he spent nearly a minute watching when a Trey Lyles elbow went uncalled and forced Green to flop — drawing a technical foul from Mitchell Ervin that flipped the energy in the building. But that didn’t stop Green from, well, moving on.

After Green was pulled from the game seconds later, he told Warriors coach Steve Kerr all about what Monk had done. He continued his anti-carry crusade on the bench, where Green engaged in a spirited shouting match with player development coach Anthony Vereen that involved actual finger-pointing in Green’s direction and was tense enough to Jonathan Kuminga and several others decided to play the role of peacemakers. Meanwhile, a Kings comeback from a 24-point deficit unfolded on the floor. The frustration on several nearby Warriors’ faces, among other things Clay Thompson, was quite visible. And with good reason.

Again, as has been the case so many times lately, Green was seemingly obsessed with the micro instead of the macro. With the game, the season and the back of their story dynasty on the line, here was Green who became so emotionally twisted in the moment that he forgot to consider the long-term consequences of his actions. The more surprising part, and the thing that seemed to leave the door wide open for incidents to come, was that Green was so comfortable being this level of extra, as the kids say, even after the two ejections and five game suspension that has already made life so unnecessarily hard on his team this season.

“The Warriors … have to keep their poise and play basketball,” TNT announcer Stan Van Gundy said during the broadcast, which led to the Kings’ 124-123 win.

By “Warriors” he obviously meant Green. And what they really need, with the February 8 deadline looming, is to finally start answering the tough questions that everyone in the Chase Center seems to want to ignore.

Where is it all going? And with that league-record $400 million payroll (including luxury tax) hanging over their heads, when might Warriors owner Joe Lacob decide it’s time for a significant change? As one executive put it in the wake of Green’s leveling of Nurkić: “I would imagine some reassessments (happening now).”

But if winning titles is the end goal for all of them — and it is — then the uncomfortable truth is that this venerable group of future Hall of Famers doesn’t seem capable of getting anywhere close. They get beat most nights, having lost 12 of their last 17 after a 5-1 start. They look broken in ways that go far beyond the box score, with a series of late-game situations going south during this brutal start. They look… cooked.

Everyone except for Chef Curry, of course. And it’s just not enough.

Steph is still Steph, 35 years old and all. But the 33-year-old Thompson, whose looming free agency added another point of stress after he and the Warriors failed to agree on an extension, is coming off his worst year in more than a decade on both ends of the floor. The 33-year-old Green, who got a four-year, $100 million deal in the summer, can still play at a high level but is still a problem because (see above).

The production of Andrew Wiggins, whose renaissance has been such a key factor in their 2022 title run, is down drastically overall. And how’s this for added uncertainty: You have a coach in Kerr whose contract is up after this season and a general manager in Mike Dunleavy Jr. which is in its first season to fill those massive shoes that by the late Bob Myers.

Everywhere I go these days, there are human reminders of how much the Warriors’ world has changed. You now see Myers on the media side as an ESPN analyst, the retired Andre Iguodala heading up the players union as executive director and former Warriors player/CEO Shaun Livingston joins his old teammate on the NBPA. These are all people who used to get through to Green, men whose credibility came in handy during those many times when a Green-inspired crisis would inevitably arrive.

That matters, of course, because it’s the absence of a calming effect that could force these Warriors to make tough decisions sooner than they might have hoped. It’s hard to keep plodding forward when the coals under your feet are so hot. You could see that dynamic play out in real time in the game in Sacramento, where it was so clear that there was no one on this team — including Steph — who could persuade Green to shift his energy in a more positive direction for the sake of the greater good.

We’ll never know what might have happened if the Warriors had taken a harder line with Green in recent years, especially after the Poole thrashing two Octobers ago. He was never suspended for that ugly act, as the Warriors instead decided to fine him while they began a short sabbatical that ended just in time for the start of the regular season. The league, which in that case showed deference to the Warriors’ celebrated culture and preferred to let the organization handle the situation, stayed on the sidelines.

In hindsight, this was clearly a mistake. A gentle precedent was set, and the Warriors would later reaffirm their loyalty to Green by re-signing him last summer, not long before Poole signed the Washington Wizards (in the three-team deal they brought Chris Paul).

But it no longer matters how they got here. The frequency of the incidents involving Green, and the near-constant stress for all involved, makes it hard to imagine this group riding off into the retirement sunset together anymore.

Not at this price. Not with these goals. And not, above all, with Green single-handedly sabotaging their twilight years like that.