RECENT LOCAL NEWS
SAN FRANCISCO — Draymond Green defended his headlock of Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert last week that earned him an ejection and five-game suspension, which expired in time for the Warriors’ deciding in-season tournament game against the Sacramento Kings on Tuesday.
The league suspension came with a note that severity was “based in part on Green’s history of unsportsmanlike acts,” a clause Green argues is unfair, referencing the retroactive one-game suspension he earned for an entanglement with LeBron James in the 2016 NBA Finals. The league implemented the Green-specific rule after he stepped on Kings’ Domantas Sabonis’ chest escaping his grasp during last season’s playoff series.
“To continue saying, ‘Oh, what he did in the past..’ I paid for those,” Green said after Warriors practice on Sunday. “I got suspended for Game 5 of the Finals. So you can’t keep suspending me for those actions.
“They’ve made it clear that they are going to hold everything against me that I’ve done before. That’s OK. I need to adjust where I see fit. Where my teammates see fit, where my coaches see fit. Where our front office sees fit. The people I care about, I trust, when I hear them say something, it means something to me.”
Green’s suspension stems from a scuffle between the Warriors and Timberwolves on Nov. 14 that started with Klay Thompson and Jaden McDaniels’ getting into it at center court. Green saw Gobert grab Thompson to pull him away from the scrum — something players concede breaks an unwritten rule not to put hands on an opposing player when breaking up a fight. Green saw that and pulled Gobert away.
“Anytime there is a situation and a teammate needs you to come to his defense, I’m going to come to their defense,” Green said. “Especially with someone I’ve been a teammate with for 12 years. That’s more than a teammate, that’s a brother. Things can be interpreted how people interpret them, I’m not here to judge people’s interpretations or change them. They are what they are. But for me, I will always be there for my teammates.”
Gobert and Green have something of a history that mostly stems from the one-time Defensive Player of the Year, Green, resenting comparisons to three-time DPOY Gobert as he sees their defensive impacts as nothing alike. After the Warriors’ loss on Nov. 14, Gobert called Green a “clown.”
“It’s kind of funny because before the game, I was telling myself that Steph is not playing, so I know Draymond is going to try and get ejected. Because every time Steph (Curry) doesn’t play, he doesn’t want to play – it’s his guy Steph. He’ll do anything he can to get ejected,” Gobert gold reporters. “Clown behavior, and I’m proud of myself for being the bigger man again and again. And yeah, doesn’t even deserve me putting my hands on him.”
Asked if he had a response to Gobert’s comments, Green took a long pause and smirked.
“No comment,” he said. “No comment is a comment, right?”
Green conceded that he has to do what he can to stay on the court for his teammates and has to hold back in those moments to ensure he doesn’t get suspended, but doesn’t plan on changing his ways entirely.
“I’m going to play basketball the way I play basketball,” Green said. “The way I play basketball has gotten me here. The way I play basketball has brought me a tremendous amount of success, individually and from a team standpoint, so I will always be myself. But I do understand and know there is room for growth and I need to be better in those moments in different situations.”
Green added that he didn’t speak to the team about the incident after his suspension. He did go over film, practice and scrimmage with teammates within the guidelines that prohibit him from being at the arena in the few hours before, during and after games.
“Our chances of winning drop dramatically if I’m not out there, so I have to be better at being there as one of the leaders of the group,” Green said. “You have to find different ways, so for me that’s the biggest lesson out of all of this.”
Green returns to the fold with the Warriors sitting at 8-9 heading to Sacramento for a deciding in-season tournament game. If the Warriors win and the Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Timberwolves earlier that day, the Warriors will win Group C and advance to the quarterfinals. If they win and the Timberwolves win, they’ll have to beat the Kings by 13 points to advance. If they lose, they’re out.
Green won’t have any minutes restrictions, but hasn’t been at full conditioning strength this season as he missed all of training camp with a sprained ankle. His availability will depend on his conditioning and if other lineup combinations perform better on Tuesday, coach Steve Kerr said.
New York natives Alfred and Blair Sadler were born involved in one another. Identical twins, the pair aligned their lives, dressing alike, both doing well in school and skipping the same grade, excelling in the same sports, singing together in the boy’s choir to which they were dragged but ended up loving, to the point where they went on to sing in the Glee Club at Amherst College.
Alfred Sadler — Baby A — was born first. Blair — Baby B — was born second. Hence their names. But there was no hierarchy. The pair understood early that they were stronger together, like that tennis match, at age 14, when the twins made the decision to team up, cooperate, rather than compete. They won.
Scholars, who spoke together at commencement, the pair pursued their postgraduate training at the University of Pennsylvania. Yet here is when their lives diverged. Fred Sadler trained in surgery at Hahnemann Medical College (now Drexel University College of Medicine), before moving on to Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital to complete his internship and residency in primary care internal medicine. His brother, Blair, upon graduation from Amherst, went on to the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, which conferred his law degree.
Here’s why.
“Blair and I were 5 years old when we both developed severe middle ear infections,” Fred Sadler said. “Our pediatrician, Dr, John Pfromm, came to our house with his black bag and his soothing voice, and reassured us and our mom. Later, I was in my sophomore year at Amherst when I thought, ‘What if, once I graduate, I were able to do what the doctor did for us?’”
Fred Sadler accepted a scholarship to Hahnemann Medical College.
Blair Sadler chose law. “My decision to attend law school was conceptual rather than career driven,” he said. “I didn’t necessarily want to be a lawyer, but I saw law school as an opportunity to develop analytical reasoning. Studying law was great preparation for rigorous thinking and debate.”
Besides, Blair Sadler received a scholarship to attend the University of Pennsylvania Law School
Nevertheless, the twin brothers went on to forge careers that played to their strengths and enabled them to work together as a medical-legal team.
Stronger together
“When we look back,” the Sadlers said, “we shouldn’t be surprised that we wanted to work together. We had been by each other’s sides in many of our biggest endeavors. Collaboration is a hallmark of many twin relationships.”
Their journey, which began more than 50 years ago, took the Sadler twins into some arenas where major decisions were being made that would have an impact on health care for generations to come. And they took their seats at the table.
“Fifty years ago, ” Fred Sadler said, “a uniform organ donation law had not been enacted, the physician assistant wasn’t a profession, bioethics wasn’t a field, and emergency medical services were provided by a painted station wagon with a driver who had inadequate medical training, or a hearse. And 911 didn’t yet exist.”
The Sadler twins became agents of change. From 1967 to 1976, they collaborated with practitioners in their respective fields to modernize emergency medical services, establish the physician assistant profession, write the universal state law authorizing organ donation, and foster the emergence of bioethics as a core principle in health care.
In 2022, the pair published “(P)luck: Lessons We Learned for Improving Healthcare and the World.” It’s a text about partnership, alignment, perseverance, and a deep devotion to public service via health and well-being. Their impetus for writing the book was parallel to their intentions in fostering the evolution of health care. Motivated by their pairing as a doctor and a lawyer, identical twin brothers with a history of teamwork, they decided to write “(P)luck” to share some of the most important lessons they learned along the way as they collaborated to make positive changes in the world.
“Pluck is a word often used to describe determination, resolve, audacity, even courage,” they wrote, with the word “luck” built in. The “luck” part is how fortunate the Sadlers felt to put themselves in the right place at the right time, to be a part of the transformations that have taken place in health care and to have done so together.
While the book chronicles groundbreaking, government-level achievements in health care and medicine, paired with the intricacies of law, it reads like a memoir, told in both narrative and a reporting style of writing. On every page, we find a lesson, applicable to agents of change and to those who simply are looking to live more consciously, authentically, and with courage.
Chapter 10, “Fifteen Lessons for Catalyzing Change,” begins with a quote by the late Congressman John Lewis, who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we call the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.” The first lesson is to begin where you are. While the last lesson is to dwell in possibility, there is a good chance the Sadlers both begin and end with that.
Perhaps most important, “(P)luck” is a textbook model on how to drive significant change, presented as an inspirational story, in which the twin team share their achievements and their lessons along the way. In addition to a pairing of significant training and higher education, some of their most effective tools have been their willingness to take initiative, to remain both resilient and optimistic when encountering switchbacks or dead ends along their path, to introduce creativity to problem-solving and, by all means, their proclivity for cooperation. Two are better than one.
Fred Sadler lives in Carmel-by-the-Mission, whereas Blair Sadler lives in San Diego. But they talk all the time and can still visit one another in the mirror. (P)luck is available on Amazon.
