Monte Poole | Warriors Insider, NBC Sports Bay Area

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40% off selected products at Blinds.com. Rules and restrictions may apply. It's after hours on CBS Sports Radio. We're pleased to welcome Monty Poole, who just has finished up his post-game coverage and responsibilities for NBC Sports in the Bay Area. Monty, when you hear Steph say that, hey, they say Dre has a reputation.

We do too. What's your reaction? That's a direct reference to the announcement made by the NBA that they were suspending Draymond. And there was a line in that announcement saying that the suspension was in part due to Draymond's history of unsportsmanlike acts. So that's Steph being, you know, being kind of chippy there and just kind of dropping that little hint in there that yeah, he read that and yeah, Draymond's history is what ended up being a factor in his suspension. And that was Steph's way of saying, I got you, we see you. What do we know about what Draymond said to the team at practice because not a whole lot has come out about that from Wednesday?

No, not much. I mean, in fact, what Steph said is the most that I've gotten from anybody. But knowing Draymond, he's a very passionate guy, a very demonstrative guy. And it's funny, the other day he was asked about Mike Brown, the coach here, assistant coach for six years. And he said, that's what he missed about Mike being around. He said his voice. And he said, Mike is one of those guys. He said, Mike, we talked about offense. You know, he gives you all the details and he's all into it. And you can kind of you hear where it's coming from. He says, but when he talks about defense, he starts sweating. He starts getting into it.

It becomes like a thing, you know. And I thought that that's Draymond. I mean, that's that's him when he starts talking about something that's important to him. That's how he is.

Did you see his podcast? You see how it can get going? And so my guess is that, yeah, what he said to them was, OK, yeah, maybe I got screwed. But it ain't about me. It ain't about me. It's about you guys doing what you have to do to win this game. We didn't play well in Sacramento. We're at home now where we've been really good.

And if we play the way we played off, he's at home. Oh, that's what they did. Oh, there he is.

Sorry, we'd lost you there for a second. Monty, do you think that Draymond got screwed by the NBA? The part that made me think that is the fact that they they made a reference to his history. And and to me, that that's not that's off. That's off limits because I mean, in Bob Meyers, the general manager kind of made an allusion to that the other day when he spoke. He said he's been punished for those things.

We didn't say what? So now they're going to place him again for the things he's already been punished for. Well, so, yeah, that part of it, I think, was a little overdone. But I think Draymond's actions after, you know, he stuck his foot onto the bonus of his body, his sternum area. I think that didn't help him in the way that he kind of courted the crowd, stirred it up and Adam Silver's the commissioners in the building.

And, you know, they don't want to see that kind of thing escalate. And Draymond, where he took it could have escalated. It didn't, but it could have. This was, you know, one night after E40, you know, the rapper got booted from the arena because of a misunderstanding, as it was said. And so there was already some in the air. There's already some tension in the air. And I think they feared that what Draymond was doing could have made it worse. It didn't, but that may have been an accident.

Why did they decide to defend him and not just be satisfied with an objection and a fine? Monique Poole is with us from NBC Sports Bay Area following the Warriors win over the Kings in game number three. It's after our CBS Sports Radio. From your perspective, as someone who's covered the Warriors for a while, how critical is Mike Brown, their former assistant coach, to the success of the Kings in his first year as their top guy?

Oh, absolutely critical. I went after Sacramento on Friday before the Warriors got there to talk to Mike. And we spent a half an hour and I my questions to him were about how did you do this? Because we've seen what the Kings have been for all these years.

What do you how do you do this? And really he explained how he got the job second week of May and the Warriors win the playoffs. They were playing with the Grizzlies and they still had to play the Mavericks.

They still had to play the Celtics in the finals. He had the job six weeks before he was able to go there. But he hired two people that he trusted and they hit the ground running.

And so by the time Mike got there, it was like, you know, all he had to do was get behind and get into the pilot's seat because the plane was already flying. And what they did was he connected one of his assistant coaches, Luke Loucks, who had also been with the Warriors in the past, to work with De'Aaron Fox. What made that really work is that Luke Loucks was an assistant with a player development coach with the Warriors. And the woman who was engaged to De'Aaron Fox had been an intern under him. So when Mike told Luke, okay, De'Aaron's your guy, De'Aaron's wife was saying, I know Luke, you gotta listen to Luke. So, you know, it's little things like that, you know, and so Mike said, the fact that Luke, that De'Aaron's now wife already had a relationship with the coach who was coaching her husband, made it so much better. It was so easy for them to connect, you know. And so from there on, between what Luke did and what Jordy Fox, his assistant did in terms of just setting the landscape. And so when Mike got there, basically all you had to do was like put on his shoes, walk into the office and start meeting people.

So that really helped. And you have a young, hungry team, too. The roster was put together pretty nicely.

The trade last year, last season or before last now with stuff, make sure to have a burden to get the bonus. You know, that is, I don't know if I've ever seen a trade work better for both teams than that one. So Monty, the series itself has featured a lot of three-point attempts. But when I finally saw the totals from this game number three, it blew me away. Did it feel like there were 97 threes that were jacked up in this game? Yeah, for a while, they're the Warriors, like every two of every three shots in the first half from the Warriors were three for a while.

They were three-happy and it's not like the bonus is a rim protector. But what kept this game wasn't their shooting, it was 40%. What kept them in this game was their defense. In fact, they took care of the basketball, 12 turnovers, only seven points of the Kings off those turnovers, and they rebounded well. But between defense rebounding and taking care of the basketball, that's what got them this victory. And it's still to me not quite, it's not a series yet. The Warriors win game four. Then I think you say, okay, now we can compete.

We got something now. It's even, and we're going back to Sacramento, and the Warriors knew from the start that they couldn't win the series without winning a game in Sacramento. They did not do that. They didn't come close in games one or two, even though the game's relatively close. Because the edge they thought they had, which was the experience, and then in game one, De'Aaron Fox and Malik Munk, in their playoff debut, took over at crunch time.

That had to be a surprise. The two guys who had never been there before, fall down when the game was on the line. And then you hear the Warriors the next day talk about how they didn't really play fundamental basketball.

It's like, okay, you guys just, your experience edge was nullified by these two guys. And then you're talking about boxing out the next day, after talking about all being locked in the week before game one. So I was a little thinking, you know what, this team, they got some issues here. And they still do, because their home record is, what they do at home is not indicative of what they do on the road.

It hasn't been all year. So yeah, they won at home. They looked good doing it. They may look good doing it again on Sunday possibly, but they still have to win there to really make this series truly interesting. Well, you set me up because my next question was going to be, why have the Warriors struggled so mightily on the road this season?

11 and 30 away from Chase Center. Makes no sense at all. I have asked that question, and really no one has given me a run with. And the same applies to all of us who are on the team.

You know, they all scratch their heads and try to figure it out. But to me, the one thing we know is that at home, they are really good at winning games late, right? You know, they had a number of games. They had 13 comebacks from games where they were down double digits and can I can one?

Every one of those games was at home. That's not a formula you can work on the road. That doesn't work on the road. It doesn't work that way. And on the road, all your sloppy defense for the first three quarters, you get to the fourth, you're already down, you know, 15 points. You ain't coming back on the road like that. And so I just think that they didn't play determine basketball on the road on a regular basis.

And why that is, that's the question that they couldn't even answer. Monty Poole of NBC Sports Bay Area with us as he is headed home after covering game number three, it's after hours on CBS Sports Radio. How would you describe the role of Kavon Looney? He's pretty. He's at this stage. He's indispensable. And for a guy who's been through what he's been through. Surgery on his on the boat trips in different years.

First four years, you know, were almost a wash because he was hurt more than he was able to play. And then he gets through that. And then he's playing through neuropathy.

If you know anything about neuropathy, there's no real cure. Well, you know, you have to manage it. You have to manage it. And he's done things to his diet and exercise regimen. And he's managing it really well.

And right now he is. He's always been a really solid defender, but he's gotten really good at becoming a really elite rebounder now, especially on offensive end. I mean, in this game, he had nine offensive rebounds. And I, you know, somebody told me, I didn't confirm, but somebody said that Steph Curry shot nine of nine on Kavon Looney's offensive rebounds tonight. Off of his second on the second chance point.

Wow. But I do know that, you know, as Kavon said through the after the game, he said, even when he was younger, he said that assistant coach Ron Adams has been around the NBA since, oh, I don't know, 1915. Ron told him that when you get an offensive rebound, kick it out. You got Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. Those guys are probably going to be open when the ball goes, when you get an offensive rebound because defense is scattered.

And sure enough, he's learned that to get to heart and he's using that. And so he's just in a game where you don't have Draymond Green or Gary Payton, the second. They're two best defenders. Looney was invaluable and for 20 rebounds, nine assists.

Where the hell did that come from? Right. So just a huge monster game from him. And he was huge last postseason. He's doing the same thing this postseason.

Yeah, he definitely filled some of that void in terms of the assists by big men that we normally see coming from Draymond Green, who's such a great passer. All right, Monty. So this this is not really fair, but I'm going to do this anyway, just because you're in the Bay Area. Yeah, no, I'm sorry.

I hope you don't mind. But you you are a trained and professional talker and you also think for a living about sports. So again, total pivot. The A's shock baseball and fans of the Bay Area by announcing that they have secured this site in Vegas and are planning on moving. How much did you hear about that at the arena and what's your reaction to it?

Um, this is where it's been trending for years. When the former commissioner Buzz Beelig directed his team to his former frat buddy, Blue Wolf and partner that was like 20 years ago now. And instead of being three groups that want to buy the team and the group that ends up with the team is Blue Wolf and his guy.

But former frat buddy. And at that point, I thought, OK, what are you trying to do here? You know, you had two teams that wanted to buy the team and wanted to keep the team in Oakland. And Blue Wolf and his guy did not want to do that.

That was never their plan. And so when we sold his part of the team, the John Fisher, who was now on the team, he started this unravel. It was like it really is a pace on the script of Major League. This team has.

Year after year, they were able to compete when they really wanted to. And then they decided, no, we're not even going to try anymore. We're going to let players go that, you know, have value. And we got to get no, no, no names to come back in the open and they'll play and we'll be terrible. And well, maybe then we won't come.

Well, guess what? People stopped coming because they got fed up with an ownership that was trading away players. They knew bringing in players they didn't know and jacking up ticket prices at the same time. That is a that's a that's a perfect scenario for declining attendance. And this is a place in this ballpark. Even it's old now, it's, you know, fifty four years old, eight years old, whatever it is in that ballpark.

They've drawn close to three million over the years and 30 years. But that was when they were trying to win game, right? And they just decided we're going to become a farm team until we get a new ballpark. We're not going to care much about the product and Billy Bean became a darling of baseball. When the A's were competing, he got a piece of the ownership and he just doesn't have the same fight that he once had used to be devastated when they when they lost in the postseason. And now he's just, you know, he's a part of the ownership team and he's riding along.

He's not long for the ride. How do people feel about Oakland losing its last professional team kicked off kicked off, but they're not surprised because they start coming to multiple ones who've been around. Saw this plan in working for years. You know, when you start doing what the Fisher ownership group started doing, that's come that's a message to the band. Yeah, we know that you want to be here for your team, but we got to rip away the players and we got to make you pay money to see players you don't even know and never heard of them. Yeah, that's so it's been disappointing for a couple of years for several years now.

And you can name they for a while there. They would get really good players and recycle bring new players and make the final way to compete, but they lost the will to compete and they don't even try to market a team very much. It's almost a lot like the old Expos deal Montreal. Gosh, you know, yes, they want them out of there. So they got them out of there and with a deliberate plan.

It's not very much the same way. Interesting. Well, Monty, thank you so much for responding to those questions. Just happened to be earlier today as the news broke.

And so you are the perfect person to be able to bounce that off of you can find Monty on Twitter at Monty, M O N T E pool, NBCS because he covers the Golden State Warriors for the NBC Sports affiliate in the Bay Area. We're glad to connect with you. Thanks so much for doing this with us live. We appreciate the time.

I gotta say like you I too lost my blue check mark. We're no longer verified Monty. We are free and unencumbered. There you go. Have a great night. Thank you. All right, you too.

Take care. I'm JR of the JR Sport Reef Show on CBS Sports Radio. I'm also the host of the new podcast Agents of Inclusion. We talk to a different Special Olympics athlete every week to learn how sports can bring us together. We're bringing both the disability and non-disability community to one community.

All one people, one family. Took me a little while, but I decided to claim autism as my superpower. When you hear the word autism, don't let that hinder you from doing whatever it is that you want to do. That's what Special Olympics tells you. You get involved in sports, but then you take it from the playing field out into real life. Family means to me community, acceptance, love, embracing a person just as they are. That's what Special Olympics did for me. It's all about family. Subscribe to Agents of Inclusion on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.