We must preface the following column with this admission: We love Draymond Green. We’ve loved him since his rookie year, back when he symbolically punked Jeremy Tyler, back when he was a chubby tweener forward with no role artfully dropping in the game-winning layup against LeBron James and the mighty Heat and having absolutely no fear of the moment. Green is part of the Family. He is a Bay Area paisan for life. When grouchy pundits or other fan bases — most of whom would move Heaven and Earth (or perhaps now, in his years of dotage, just Earth and a cache of second-rounders) to acquire him — clown on him, underrate him, demean him, we fire back instinctively. Because we have seen with our own human eyeballs that without Green, there are four fewer championship banners drooping in the rafters. Simple as that.
But after another Green suspension — this one for five games after a ridiculously expeditious headlock on Rudy Gobert — we have to ask: My man, with love, is it possible to perhaps … do less? At this point in your career, for just a few months of this year, let’s say until hopefully June, would it be such a Sisyphean ordeal to pull your head out of your ass?
The suspension itself is something of a non-starter as a reprimand. As a repeat offender and known hardwood hotspur, a five-game suspension feels simultaneously like both an underwhelming and excessive punishment. For the act of emasculating the much larger Gobert, one to two games would probably suffice. But punishment (at least for on-court antics, let’s not even speak on the NBA’s poor record of domestic and sexual assault) doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You earned the rep, so be prepared when the hammer falls. But what happens when Green comes back and something like this happens again for just as flimsy a reason? At what point does Warriors head coach Steve Kerr have to intervene and have “the talk”?
Green, for better or worse, has always been a boon or a burden — and sometimes both at the same time. This is an article of faith the Warriors (coaches, players, fans) have long ago accepted. Mostly it’s been fine, sometimes great. But the margins for these types of eminently avoidable shenanigans are tightening as the core inches toward AARP membership. Green, one of the smartest guys on the team, simply can’t play so dumb. He’s not a rookie making a name for himself anymore. He’s a four-time NBA champion that (scolding, tweedy voice) should know better than to still be trying to prove how tough he is. There’s a certain point when looking out for your guys like that isn’t leadership or setting a tone, but is instead a sort of vanity. It’s not as though Green is a psychopath. He knows what he’s doing! He knows his importance to the team, his worth, their mutual reliance on one another. That’s why the “antics” are so deflating. Even if you defend them, you wish you didn’t have to. You wish this basketball savant didn’t insert himself into such avoidable quandaries.
Golden State has stagnated after a strong start to the season, with the high point arguably being a rousing, righteous defeat to the champion Denver Nuggets (without Green). This team was always going to be a work in progress, and that’s fine. An unsatisfactory position in the standings in mid-November isn’t the end of the world. But one does get the feeling that this could snowball into something a little more fraught should they not string together some wins soon. It’s not that the vibes are bad or the roster is intrinsically flawed. They simply haven’t risen to the occasion, and the Tuesday’s incident encapsulates all the worst bits of a team unprepared for the big moment, or even a rather medium-sized moment. Entering a game knowing that Steph Curry was out, Green could have settled the team’s nerves by example and kept them even-keeled as they dug themselves back out of their early graves with some mental fortitude, at least yell at them to be where they’re supposed to be on defense. All of that would have been great. Instead, no. First, Gobert must be humbled.
You can view the correlation between Green’s ejections and Curry’s availability as both an example of Gobert trying to spit fire of the psychological warfare brand, but his clumsy trash-talk did manage to strike a nerve with a fan base desperate for some leadership. Leadership is just one of those nebulous things you can’t quite define when it comes to this team. The Warriors generally like to put out the perception of a well-oiled machine in which vocal displays of leadership are sort of unnecessary, but the results have been mixed. Andre Iguodala isn’t here anymore. Klay Thompson can’t be bothered to step into that role, since it seemingly goes against his core being. Kerr is a thoughtful diplomat, but at this point in his tenure, is unable or unwilling to do anything to shake the Steph/Klay/Dray trio out of their long-established habits, both good and bad. And Curry is not the type to step forward and demand more unless absolutely necessary (like before Game 7 against the Kings last playoffs).
The leadership nodes — vocal edition — comes down to newly acquired Chris Paul, a former rival and himself something of a known curmudgeon, and Green, who both barks and bites, the thinking man’s hothead, a sort of Machiavellian rascal. You can almost imagine him defending his ejection on the grounds that it earned Brandin Podziemski his bonafides, and that in the long-term, the team will be better situated for a championship run. That’s a joke, but only barely. Green, a basketball genius who should someday have a 100-foot golden statue erected outside of Chase Center, has lost the mandate of heaven in recent years — from his absolute abdication of giving a damn about the 2019-20 season and punching his erstwhile teammate Jordan Poole to treating a chance to fall to .500 without Curry with all the gravity of Summer League.
He’s got to be better than this. He can’t be so easily baited into becoming a caricature of himself. The Warriors aren’t winning anything unless they get the best possible version of Green: clear-headed, energized, motivated. That’s not what we saw against Minnesota. It’s a long way from what we saw against Minnesota, and it’s not even the incident itself, but how unsurprising it was, how little it felt like an aberration.
So, Draymond Green, from all of us stans and simps and long-time converts: accept that your team will go nowhere without your leadership. You have to know that. They will be dead in the water. Doomed. This is literally the moment to step up, to step out of the fire-and-brimstone comfort zone and show the world your multitudes. You need to prove to yourself, to them, to us, to the naysayers and the apologists alike, that you are the leader this team needs, has always needed. Leaders have to lead, even when leading is annoying. That’s their moral imperative. No more pointless, counterintuitive antics.