The Warriors missed a chance Sunday to sweep the Spurs and will try to close out the playoff series Tuesday. In between, Golden State had an off day that was anything but, at least for NBA fans, as the team generated plenty of news.
Two items Monday were of particular note. One involved an allegedly stolen jacket that has Warriors players upset, and the other concerned a possibly upset Russell Westbrook and Kevin Durant’s efforts to defuse the situation.
The jacket in question belonged to Ralph Walker, Golden State’s director of team security and Stephen Curry’s personal bodyguard, and was reported to have been snatched last week by Mike Shumann, a sports anchor at San Francisco’s KGO-TV. The station has a contract with the team for exclusive interviews, many of which have been conducted by Shumann, but he was sent home ahead of Sunday’s contest, which took place in San Antonio, and removed from postgame coverage.
According to the Athletic, Warriors assistant coach Jarron Collins captured video of Shumann. ESPN reported that it had reviewed the video and found that the footage showed the longtime Bay Area personality taking the jacket while leaving a practice session at AT&T Center.
“We are taking these allegations very seriously and conducting a full investigation,” KGO told the Athletic in a statement. “As a matter of policy, we do not comment about personnel matters.”
The Athletic reported that several Warriors players are irked that Shumann, who is white, did not face greater and more immediate punishment. They were said to be wondering how the situation might have played out if Shumann, a former Super Bowl-winning wide receiver for the 49ers, were a person of color, and they reportedly have been less-than-receptive to his attempts to apologize.
Durant might eventually have to apologize to Westbrook, if his former Thunder teammate still feels dissed by what the Warriors forward described Monday as a social-media accident. Durant said he was scrolling through his Instagram feed when he inadvertently hit “like” on a comment.
Apparently, it was just happenstance that the commenter was making the case that Westbrook was the “problem” from which Durant was trying to get away when he defected to Golden State in 2016. That much-publicized departure reportedly caused a rift between the two all-star players that took roughly a year to begin to heal.
“No story here,” Durant told ESPN’s Chris Haynes, in a clearly futile effort to deter sports bloggers (ahem) from taking gleeful note of the episode. He also described the “like” as a “total accident” to ESPN’s Royce Young, but many were reminded that Durant has been strongly suspected of using pseudonymous social-media accounts to take shots at critics, and of occasionally forgetting to switch to those accounts from his verified ones.
If that has been the case, it’s possible Durant was at it again, and meant to like the comment about Westbrook under an anonymous handle. Even if his version of events is correct, it raises the question of why he was perusing an exchange between seemingly random Instagram users with such apparent interest.
For his part, Shumann, normally a prolific tweeter, has been as absent of late on social media — at least on his verified Twitter account — as he has been on KGO’s recent Warriors coverage. Just call it a sleeve of absence? Shumann may be coated in shame, but when it comes to bizarre NBA developments, he has certainly blazer-ed a trail.
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