The Warriors stand on the precipice of playoff math that makes statisticians giddy and opponents queasy: teams that take a 3-1 lead win their series 95.2% of the time. But before Golden State starts fantasizing about those odds, they’ll need to navigate a combustible Game 4 featuring a potentially volcanic subplot.
That and Jimmy Butler might be returning…mwahahaha.
Golden State Warriors vs Houston Rockets
When: April 28th, 2025 | 7:00 PM PT
TV: TNT, NBC Sports Bay Area
Radio: 95.7 The Game
Shams: Jimmy Butler (pelvic) expected to play Monday.
— Underdog NBA (@UnderdogNBA) April 28, 2025
Houston Rockets need to escape Chase Center with a win. Enter Jalen Green — Houston’s mercurial scoring guard whose playoff performances have swung more wildly than a pendulum in an earthquake. Green morphed from single-digit scorer in Games 1 and 3 to a 38-point flamethrower in Game 2 who launched 18 three-pointers with the casual confidence of a man tossing paper into a wastebasket from his office chair.
Saturday’s Game 3 defeat featured the worst kind of postscript for Houston: their young star got bottled up (just 9 points on 4-of-11 shooting) AND got into a verbal sparring match with Draymond Green as the teams walked off the court. When Jalen took a swing at Draymond’s reputation (“He can’t really do much of anything else, so talking is his only way”), he might have awakened something far more dangerous than his own pride.
The Warriors have specialized in constructing a defensive forcefield around Green throughout the series. Golden State simply wouldn’t let the Rockets’ explosive guard find rhythm. But provocation has a funny way of focusing the unfocused, and Jalen Green’s history suggests he’s exactly the type of player who channels disrespect into unstoppable offensive outbursts.
Stats don’t lie: When Jalen Green goes, so go the Rockets. The statistical chasm between his performance in Houston’s regular season wins versus losses tells a stark story. In wins, he averaged 22.5 points on 44.6% shooting with a sizzling 37.1% from three. In losses? Just 18.4 points on an anemic 38.1% from the field and 32.3% from beyond the arc.
The Warriors’ defensive strategy remains clear: make Green uncomfortable, force him into tough shots, and watch the Rockets’ half-court offense sputter like an engine missing a spark plug. But Monday night presents the perfect storm for Green’s redemption arc — home crowd, playoff intensity, and now the extra motivation of proving Draymond wrong.
Jimmy Butler’s potential return from injury adds another layer of intrigue to the matchup. With or without him, expect Game 4 to showcase Stephen Curry’s continued brilliance (fresh off moving into the top 10 all-time playoff scorers) while the Warriors remain hyper-vigilant against a potential Jalen Green explosion.
For Houston, the math is brutally simple: contain Curry (easier said than done after his 36-point masterpiece in Game 3), get Green going early, and hope your season isn’t effectively over by Tuesday morning. For Golden State, the formula is equally straightforward: keep the clamps on Green, ride Curry’s magic, and put themselves one step away from the second round.
As the NBA’s brightest young talents often remind us: sometimes all it takes is one perceived slight — or one suggestion to “go paint your nails” — to unlock a scoring outburst that changes everything. Monday night, we’ll find out if the Green-on-Green crime scene from Game 3 was just the beginning of a much more explosive chapter in this series.