Kawakami: How Draymond Green, Steph Curry and Steve Kerr plotted out their Game

SAN FRANCISCO — Draymond Green flipped off his TV with a few minutes left in the Warriors’ easy Game 3 victory over the Kings last Thursday, left his home, fought the arena traffic and got to Chase Center with one thing on his mind.

“Where’s Steph?” he yelled out to a staffer as he poked his head into the Warriors’ locker room about 20 minutes after the final buzzer. Draymond quickly found Curry in the training room, winding down from the blowout victory. And then the two leaders of this team put their heads together and immediately started planning for Game 4.

Draymond had an idea after watching the game: Why change anything from the starting lineup that rocked the Kings in Game 3 with Draymond out suspended? Why force anybody else to the bench to make room for him in Game 4?

And he urgently wanted to run it all past Curry. (Beyond the strategy talk, Draymond also very much wanted to celebrate Curry’s great performance in Game 3.) The result: Steve Kerr, who was thinking along the same lines, didn’t start Draymond in Sunday’s Game 4 and at times alternated Draymond with Kevon Looney, which kept more shooters on the floor, the same as in Game 3, and the Warriors hung on to beat the Kings, 126-125, to even the series, 2-2.

Looney played well, which is zero surprise. Jordan Poole, who would’ve been taken out of the starting lineup if Draymond went back in, played well. And Draymond started the second half alongside Looney (and with Poole out), which is when the Warriors took control of this game. Though the Warriors almost gave it back in the final minute with an all-time blunder when Curry called a timeout after the Warriors spent all of them (Kerr took the blame for not telling his players about the timeout count), this victory was exactly what the Warriors needed to put the Kings on their heels headed into Wednesday’s Game 5 in Sacramento.

And here’s why it’s an instant piece of Warriors lore: Draymond’s volunteering for a seat on the bench followed Andre Iguodala acceding to losing his starting spot at the start of the Kerr era, Curry agreeing to come off the bench for the first four games of the Denver series last year when he was coming back from an injury and Looney yo-yoing out of the lineup throughout his career.

This is just how the Warriors have always done things in this era. Figure out the best thing to do to win the next game. Then do it. And the informal Curry-Draymond summit meeting was another example of how they work through things when they absolutely have to.

“That’s nothing new,” Curry told me after his postgame news conference of the strategy session. “We always have those type of conversations. In the playoffs, it’s a little bit more fun because you’re trying to figure out the chess pieces of a certain series. But back to the Memphis barbecue spot in 2015 (before) Game 4, we always have those conversations.”

Curry is referring, of course, to his fabled mind-clearing…