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NBA Players Draymond Green and Tristan Thompson Involved in Fistfight at LA Club

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What happens when sports beef spills out into the real world

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2018 NBA Finals - Game Three
Tristan Thompson and Draymond Green
Photo by Gregory Shamus/Getty Images
Farley Elliott is the Senior Editor at Eater LA and the author of Los Angeles Street Food: A History From Tamaleros to Taco Trucks. He covers restaurants in every form, from breaking news to the culture, people, and history that surrounds LA's dining landscape.

Yesterday’s NBA off-season news cycle got an unexpected lift when it was revealed that players Tristan Thompson and Draymond Green apparently got into a fist fight inside Los Angeles restaurant hotspot Delilah.

Green, of the championship-winning Golden State Warriors, and Cleveland Cavalier Tristan Thompson have beef extending back to last year’s playoffs, when the two nearly came to blows in game one of the NBA finals. There was a lot of talk on both sides after that game of finding some time in the postseason to perhaps take the fight out into the world, and that’s apparently exactly what went down at Delilah earlier this month.

As first reported by Bossip, Thompson was one of several NBA players gathered at Delilah after the ESPY’s awards ceremony that took place on July 18. Green was also in attendance, as were Kevin Durant and newly-minted Laker LeBron James. Various sources have diverged here on a few key details, but it’s generally believed that Green approached Thompson in the club — possibly to offer a mea culpa for the heated playoffs moment from months earlier — and was quickly rebuffed by Thompson, with reports calling the fight everything from a “sucker punch” by Thompson to little more than a “face mush.” Sports reporter Jason McIntyre was one of the first to corroborate the original reporting on Twitter, saying Thompson “leveled” Green with a punch. Durant and James reportedly broke up the scuffle shortly after.

Eater reached out to the h.wood group to confirm the rumor, but they’ve been mum on details of the Delilah incident so far. The club, located on Santa Monica Boulevard not far from the h.wood group’s other properties like Petite Taqueria and The Nice Guy, is a hotspot for celebrities and athletes, so it’s not unusual to have several artists and professional players in attendance all at once. Actually fighting inside, though; that doesn’t happen often.