Curry loses his cool, fined $25,000

CLEVELAND >> After it slowly sank in on Thursday night, after Stephen Curry realized he had been ejected from a game for the first time in his NBA career, all he could do was perform penance for his behavior.

It began with a long, deliberate exit from the court. Curry was jeered by a ravenous capacity crowd in Cleveland as he passed the scorer’s table and then his own bench, where he paused for a moment before continuing his perp walk to the locker room.

There Curry sat, as he considered his circumstances. He had to wait out the final 4 minutes 22 seconds while the Cleveland Cavaliers put the last touches on their emphatic 115-101 Game 6 victory over Curry’s Golden State Warriors, sending the NBA finals back to Oakland, California, for a deciding Game 7 on Sunday.

“I just sat in my chair,” Curry said later at a news conference. “I’ve never been ejected before, so it was a weird feeling. It was just frustration and also kind of, like you said, I thought it was kind of hilarious the way the last two fouls and me blowing up kind of unfolded and some of the things that were said out there.”

It was as if all of the events of the last week had congealed for Curry: the suspension of his teammate Draymond Green for Game 5; the loss of another teammate, Andrew Bogut, to injury; the jousting with LeBron James; and, finally, his brief, but startling, loss of cool late in Game 6, when he flung his mouthpiece into the stands after he had fouled out and was immediately tossed from the scene by the referees.

Today, the NBA fined Curry and Warriors coach Steve Kerr $25,000 each for their outbursts about the officiating in the game. Specifically, Curry was fined for throwing his mouthpiece, which hit a person in the stands, and Kerr was fined for his public criticism of the officiating at a postgame news conference.

No team has ever lost a three-games-to-one lead in the NBA Finals, but the mighty Warriors, who for the past week have been on the cusp of back-to-back titles, are now in danger of doing just that.

And it showed the depths of the Warriors’ exasperation that it was not the combustible Green or the sometimes feisty Kerr who blew up as Game 6 slipped away for good, but the cherublike Curry.

“There is nothing in his entire time in the league that would tell you this is anything other than frustration that had built up,” Warriors forward Harrison Barnes said of Curry’s mouthpiece misdemeanor.

Curry said, “I had some stuff I wanted to get off my chest tonight after the way the game went, and that was it.”

Watching Game 6 unfold the way it did was apparently too much for Curry’s wife, Ayesha, as well. She wrote on Twitter that Game 6 was rigged, for either money or TV ratings. “I won’t be silent,” she wrote.

But then she was. She deleted the post shortly after it appeared, and as she and Curry’s parents waited for him outside the locker room, she wiped away tears and shielded her eyes while they were affixed to her phone.

She waved away a reporter who approached, saying, “I’m fine, thank you.”

The NBA was powerless to fine Curry’s wife, but Curry was a different story, although he did quickly apologize to the fan he had struck with the mouthpiece. And Kerr’s fine was a no-brainer, as he had opened his postgame news conference by calmly, but directly, criticizing the officials for three of the six fouls called on Curry, terming them “absolutely ridiculous.” Kerr also called out the official who levied the sixth foul, Jason Phillips, by name.

“Let me be clear, we did not lose because of the officiating,” Kerr said. “But three of the six fouls were incredibly inappropriate calls for anybody, much less the MVP of the league.”

Kerr, seeking to set the tone for the officiating in Game 7, was not the only one playing mind games. LeBron James, whom Kerr accused of flopping on Curry’s final foul, went out of his way to bump Curry after making a layup on Thursday night and, in another sequence, barked at Curry after swatting away his shot near the basket.

Curry, whose layup attempt after the buzzer in Game 5 was also blocked by James, answered with little other than a smile late Thursday when asked about his star rival.

“However he wants to celebrate or whatever he wants to do to kind of take in that moment, it is what it is,” Curry said. “I stay aggressive — don’t let him get in my head.”

The Warriors have not been the aggressors in three of the last four games. It took them more than five minutes to score in Game 6, and they missed 21 of their first 25 shots. They trailed by as many as 24 points in the third quarter, and the Cavaliers withstood each run the Warriors made.

Curry was whistled for his fifth foul with 9:49 left in the fourth quarter after he had poked the ball away from Kyrie Irving. Later came the sixth foul when James and Curry made contact with each other. At that point, the mouthpiece went flying.

Nobody on the Warriors seemed bothered by Curry’s outburst. In fact, some players said, they were buttressed by it.

“Absolutely,” Klay Thompson said when asked if the Warriors needed to play angry on Sunday. “Play angry, but don’t play with so much emotion it takes you out of your focus. But 100 percent play angry. We feel like we could have closed it out a long time ago, but here we are.”