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Ten days after beating the Cleveland Cavaliers to win his second NBA title, 27-year-old Draymond Green still has some shit to talk. He’s in the brick-walled New York offices of Maverick Carter, LeBron James’ longtime business partner, here to film a promo video for a celebrity soccer game in which he’ll coach a team opposite Drake.
“They didn’t stand a fucking chance,” he says of the Cavs, who lost in five games. “It pissed me off we didn’t sweep them, though.”
It's June 22, and the Golden State Warriors have just ripped through the NBA playoffs, going 16-1 en route to the championship. It was something you might get in a video game’s dynasty mode if you turned trade restrictions to “off:” Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, and Green driving a steamroller on hardwood. Only this was real life, and, given that their four all-star core looks to be intact for the foreseeable future, the Warriors' postseason dominance acts as an NBA earthquake, tremors and aftershocks cascading outward, setting in motion what just may be the craziest offseason in league history.
Hours after I talk to Green, the Bulls will trade Jimmy Butler to the Minnesota Timberwolves. Six days later, Chris Paul will join James Harden in Houston. The rest of the summer plays out like a very athletic game of Red Rover: Paul George and Melo head to Oklahoma City; Kyrie Irving and Gordon Hayward join the Boston Celtics; Isaiah Thomas and Dwyane Wade link up with LeBron in Cleveland. Eight marquee players—who have combined for forty-five total all-star selections—switch homes, the very landscape of the league changing in the shadow of the growing juggernaut in the Bay Area.
And, here in Tribeca, before any of it happens, Draymond Green knows it’s coming.
“It’s so funny sitting back and watching this shit,” he starts, before pausing to pull his phone out of his jeans, looking through the Golden State Warriors’ group chat. (The team has one, and the Hampton Five—Green, Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, and Kevin Durant, the five guys that were in the Hamptons in the summer of 2016 to recruit KD—has another.) He wants to relay something that Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey had said in an interview, reacting to the Warriors' title. The team had texted it to each other: “They are not unbeatable. There have been bigger upsets in sports history. We are going to keep improving our roster. We are used to long odds. If Golden State makes the odds longer, we might up our risk profile and get even more aggressive. We have something up our sleeve.”
Then he pauses, scoffing at Morey’s comments.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he says to me. “They are really trying to rethink their whole strategy”—here he bumps a table repeatedly with his hand for emphasis, getting excited—“because teams know they don’t have a fucking clue.”
On a roll now, he remembers the Warriors’ lone playoff loss, in Game 4 of the Finals, when the Cavs sank twenty-four three-pointers, an NBA Finals record.
“That’d never been done!” Green exclaims. “They don’t come out and hit twenty-four threes and they’re swept. And that’s the second best team in the world. It’s pretty fucking sick to see how everybody is just in a fucking panic about what to do. You sit back and think, like, these motherfuckers, they know. That’s the fun part about it: They know they don’t stand a chance.”
Post-title gloat aside, Green is not about to do what LeBron did seven years ago, after his talents arrived in South Beach to join Chris Bosh, D-Wade, and set this NBA arms race into motion. He’s not going to say that he and his super bros won’t be happy with just one ring (or four, or five, or six).
“At the end of the day, it’s hard as hell to win a championship,” says Green. “To say, ‘Yeah, if we don’t do this, we failed?' No the fuck [we] didn’t. We won a championship. We are champions forever. If I never win another championship, I will forever be called: Draymond Green, NBA fucking champion.”
But now a new season is starting, and once it does, the public’s memory gets hazy real quick—particularly one in which 93% of general managers expect you to repeat. And Green would later belie his own assuredness, bringing up the 1990’s Bulls (who won six titles in eight years) and the 1950’s/60’s Celtics (eleven in thirteen) before pointing out that the Warriors “really haven’t done shit.”
In order to put together a similarly historic run, they’ll have to avoid what Pat Riley coined the “Disease of Me,” a virus liable to spread on a team of all-stars, when there are less touches, shots, and credit for those who’ve come to expect frequent doses of each. Marriages get harder the longer they last, scorned egos creating fissures that can crumble collective success.
“Just because you compile a team of superstars don't mean it's going to work, because it's a lot of ego,” says Green. “And we just happen to have a perfect group to where it works. You can't be that good without ego. But it's not an ego in the sense of: I need this shot, I need that shot. Ego in the sense of: We're fucking good. Damn right we are.”
Sitting on the top of NBA Mountain with Draymond Green, looking back at asses kicked and left behind, it’s easy to forget just how far down in the valley he was only one summer ago, in 2016—and what he had to go through to climb back up.
He began in June by writing the first line of the NBA epitaph he’s been trying to erase since: Here lies the man who, in Game 4 of the 2016 Finals, his Warriors on their way to a 3-1 series lead and a repeat championship over the Cleveland Cavaliers, found his arm connecting with the undercarriage of LeBron James’s manzone. It was his third groin-related incident of the playoffs, after two previous knocks to the supremely unfortunate testicles of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Steven Adams in the Western Conference Finals (one knee-shot which looked innocent; one leg-kick which looked less so). You know what happened next: Green was suspended for Game 5 (which Cleveland won), the fateful seesaw tipped back the Cavs’ way, and—meme-ified for eternity—the Warriors blew a 3-1 lead.
So, like any good down-in-the-dumps Millennial, Green turned to his smartphone. Minutes after that Finals collapse, sitting at his locker, he texted Kevin Durant: “See what we’re missing. We need you. Make it happen.” But it was weeks until that seed could grow into Kevin Durant in a Warriors uniform. So, in the meantime, he had to take refuge in the words of a guy he thought could best understand him: the man who, outside of Michael Jordan, is considered the most sociopathically intense player to ever step foot on NBA hardwood.
“I was going through all that shit with the media and with the kicks and I was fucked up,” Green says. “So I called Kobe [Bryant], and said, ‘[This] shit’s killing me, because these people are painting me to be something that I’m not, wondering, would I kick anybody on purpose? I wouldn’t kick anybody on purpose. It’s fucked up.’”
Bryant’s words, according to Green: Ninety-eight percent of people are okay with mediocrity or less. Guys like Bryant and Green, though, they're out for something different—greatness. So, Green remembers Kobe saying, “as long as you wait for them to understand you, you’re fucked.”
“It was the best shit I ever heard,” Green says. “Because it gave me an understanding of why people don’t understand me. I’m so crazy competitive. I put my competitiveness up there with anyone. How could someone understand that? It’s a different level.”
Green says that winning “doesn’t make me as happy as losing makes me sad,” and to be in front of him as he talks about it, merely remembering what it felt like to have lost those Finals, you can tell it’s more than lip service. “It irks me bad,” he says, talking deliberately. “That’s why I always want to do whatever I can to win, because I…” He trails off, unable to finish the thought. “Shit fucks me up.” Later, on the phone, Bob Myers, the General Manager of the Warriors, will fill in where Green couldn’t: “He values winning more than anything. He might value it too much,” he says, chuckling. “As far as a healthy, balanced life, that may not be his thing. He's calm in chaos. In times of peace, I don't think he feels calm.”
But if Green saw in Bryant similar competitive intensity, he also called because of something he was missing. Kobe is the Professor Emeritus of DGAF-ness, and it was an indifference to the never-ending chorus of haters that Green would need that offseason, his summer getting worse before it got better: After taking responsibility for his team’s championship collapse, he accidentally leaked a picture of his own manzone on Snapchat and was arrested for allegedly slapping a Michigan State football player, which was later reduced from a criminal charge and settled with a misdemeanor plea deal. (It is worth noting that even during what he describes as a nightmare of a summer, he won a gold medal with the USA Olympic basketball team.) Talking about it even a year later, he turns inwards, fingers fidgeting with a phone cord on the table in front of him, visibly uncomfortable.
“That was rock bottom for me,” Green says. “People always wanted to paint me as this villain, this problem child, this guy who can't control himself, this dangerous guy. I had heard that shit my entire life. And like: Motherfucker, you can't tell me I'm this or that. I got good grades and I graduated college, and I'm never in trouble. Like real trouble. Getting a fucking tech is getting a tech—it's basketball. But to get in trouble like that, and finally give people who've always wanted to say, ‘I told y'all, he's this type of guy, or he's a distraction’—for the first time in my life, I gave them room to say that. I did that. And it fucking destroyed me. That hurt me more than anything. I just gave motherfuckers ammo to shoot me with. When they've always tried to shoot, but they never had any ammo. I gift wrapped them ammo. To shoot me.”
When I discuss those low moments with his mom, Mary Babers-Green, she brings up another rough summer of his, in the months after his freshman year of high school. Green’s science teacher had caught him cheating on a final exam. When his mom got the call, she proceeded to throw everything out of his room: his stereo, his T.V., his dresser, his bed. She gave his game system—which she separately had to make him quit playing because he was such a sore loser—to the daycare her mom ran. Asked what was left in his bedroom that summer, she says, “The floor.” She wouldn’t even let him play basketball, and made him walk the four-mile round trip to the community center where he worked, turning away bosses who called to ask if they could give him a lift. Science exam be damned, it was her way of making sure he’d never fail the test of self-sufficiency.
“You have water, light, a roof over your head, food to eat—that’s what you’re supposed to have,” she says now. “Everything else you feel like you deserve, get it yourself.” Growing up in the inner city of Saginaw, Michigan, “he didn’t have a net. He didn’t have somebody who was going to rescue him.”
It was a lesson Green re-learned last summer, when, according to Mom, “he finally became a man,” truly on his own. In his words: “Everything I went through and seeing how people turn on you, [I realized] you got to be there for you when no one else is. It’s just physically impossible for anybody to be there 24/7. You are with you 24/7.” To listen to Green tell it, part of that becoming a man meant pivoting, from a man who cared what people thought to realizing it didn’t really matter. When he says he thinks “every person is two people: the person that everyone sees, and the person inside,” I ask what he wants us to know about the person inside that we don’t get to see.
“The old me would say all the good in me,” he says. “All the good I know I have in me. Most people would never know that. The new me would just say: Figure it out.”
When Kevin Durant signed with Golden State on July 4th of that summer, the Warriors emerged from America’s birthday as the real-life Monstars—and, for NBA fans leading the super-team backlash, Draymond Green became the most obvious target. He was the hard-nosed, bruising defender on a team full of chainsaw-through-butter smooth baby faces. When it comes to emotion and toughness, Steph, KD, and Klay are the hyenas to Green’s Scar. So that informs his attitude on the court—a guy he describes as “super competitive,” before adding what seems like an important addendum. “Some would say an asshole.”
As Green has exploded into NBA stardom over the last three years, he’s earned that reputation through some combination of on-court antics—the three now infamous below-the-belt shots from the 2016 playoffs; the technical-earning tantrums; his signature flexing celebration—and the trash he talks to everyone, from pine-riding Paul Pierce to the entire city of Cleveland to Conor McGregor. If a game devolves into a circus (say, like Game 4 of both of the last two Finals series), you’re most likely to see Green in the center ring, arms extended in the air, palms opening and closing like a hungry baby in a high chair, eager to be spoon-fed boos and “Draymond sucks!” chants. The great irony of this antagonism, of course, being that you don’t scream at the top of your lungs about someone who actually sucks. As his mom eloquently puts it, “Booing is just love in reverse.”
Green knows he can “be too passionate, sometimes,” but emphasizes that it is a side of a coin. “Without the passion, I'm not great!” he says. “The majority of the time I'm passionate enough. If I'm never passionate, you never know who I am. Because there's no passion to even get me to this point, for someone to say, ‘That's a negative.’ Nobody gives a fuck.”
If Draymond Green acts the role of the Warriors’ most annoying player, it’s hard to overstate just how vital that role is. Yes, we know: put Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush on a basketball court with Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant, and they’d still probably beat the New York Knicks. But Green is the pendulum on which they swing from good to great, the cheat code that unlocks one of the deadliest offenses in NBA history. It's a revolutionary system—called the “Death Line-up” even before Durant arrived—that manhandles your defense by out-running, out-shooting, out-pick-and-rolling, and out-scoring you into submission. Its fatal flaw should be that its players are too small, leaving them exposed and vulnerable to mismatches on the defensive end. Enter Green, the reigning Defensive Player of the Year. At a position-less 6’7” (a size which scouts thought put him in a no-man’s land), with freakishly long limbs and a Rhodes Scholar-esque basketball IQ, he is a defense’s mismatch antidote: a skilled enough 1-on-1 defender to stop anyone; a savvy enough team defender to know just when to slide to help a foundering teammate.
And as anyone who has ever played a game of pickup basketball knows, the guy who’s really into defense is a special brand of pain-in-the-ass. He hustles, and boxes out, and does all the other consummate teammate, completely unglamorous bullshit that fills in all the space between 40-foot three-pointers and monstrous dunks. (Nobody dreams of winning a game on a defensive slide from the help side. In fact, it’s so un-sexy that MVP runner-up James Harden even made a commercial about how little defense he plays.)
Myers says Green sets the team’s competitive, emotional, and spiritual edge. That can come in the form of a triple-double in rebounds, assists, and steals on a night in which he only scores four points, or in a pair of game-defining blocks—but it can also manifest in tantrums, technicals, or in teammates’ faces, shouts that his mom says are a form of motivation. “Growing up in the inner city, that’s how you did things. Nice people finish last in the hood. So he pushes and he pushes until he may make you upset.” About his energy, Myers says, “95% of the time, it comes out in a positive way. And 5%, it comes out in a different way. You live with that. We need it. Because otherwise—I wouldn't characterize us as too nice but to win at any level, and succeed consistently, you need to be a little uncomfortable. And he makes us a little uncomfortable.”
This is the Draymond Green Paradox. He’s the type of vocal, high-energy, do-everything player you need in a stable of superstars—one who’s content to become an all-star by scoring less, and to get in the face of the all-stars who score more. And yet he’s also the one horse most likely to get loose and run wild (see: the 2016 NBA playoffs). The thing that his unselfishness keeps from undoing the Warriors—the “Disease of Me”—is the very thing that occasionally undoes him.
“My mom used to always tell me: It's not about beating the person in front of you, it's about beating the person inside of you,” he says. “Most people can't beat that person.”
On a September morning in Oakland, Green is in the Golden State Warriors practice facility, trying to beat that person—and talking trash to himself while he does. It’s one of his last offseason Fridays, and he’s in the fifth-floor gym—on top of a downtown Marriott—going through a series of shooting drills under the direction of his trainer Travis Walton. Green keeps leaving his shots short. “Shoot the fucking ball, bro!” he yells, the lone Warrior on the court.
With Drake’s “KMT” blasting, Green begins an exercise where he alternates shooting three-pointers from the corner and the wing. He needs to hit ten to end the drill. The first five go down easy. “Six!” he yells, as he launches the sixth, calling his shot. Swish. “Seven!” Swish. “Eight!” Swish. On a team of guys who shoot like velvet feels, Green’s motion sticks out as particularly clumsy. He hinges slowly at the waist before springing upwards like an inelegant jack-in the-box, ball coming low from his hip, remarkably long, Gumby arms holding the release at the top. He looks a little bit like one of those inflatable tube men you see at car dealerships—but with a more accurate jump shot.
The treys keep dropping anyway. He makes the ninth, from the wing, then runs back to the corner to finish the drill off. “Game!” Green yells as he lets the tenth go, before turning away from the basket and putting his hands on his hips, sure that it’s going in.
It does not go in. Green realizes this when he swings back around, triumphantly, full of signature Draymond Green swagger, only to see the ball in Walton’s hands, loaded up for another pass. “I missed that?” he asks, incredulous, eyes wide. “Get the fuck outta here!”
It’s striking not that he’s upset he missed the shot—any shooter on any court would be—but that missed shots look like they offend him, each its own personal attack, another in a long list of insults from the universe.
For most of his career, he hasn’t had to work very hard to find them, reports of his shortcomings perpetually following like a shadow: too slow, too chubby, too unskilled, can’t shoot. And yet he’s never compromised. At both Michigan State and Golden State, he made a place for himself in offensive systems that held no natural spot for a guy with his size and skillset. Off the court, he’s a gift to NBA beat writers and NBA Twitter, the closest thing to a 2017 Charles Barkley (well, except for 2017 Charles Barkley). He’s the rare athlete who either forgot to drink from the platitude punch bowl or took a look at it and said, Nah. “I’m smart enough to know what I want to say,” he says. “And I don’t give a fuck enough to say exactly what I want to say.”
“Most people would say I'm a superstar now. I don't think so,” he says, a begrudging acknowledgment of the place he's made for himself in the basketball universe. “I averaged ten points a game last year. That’s very modest. So if you do think that, that means I did it a different way. That means I did it my way. And that was always my number one goal: do it my way.”
And for a guy whose way has always been facing off against some form of cosmic resistance—Myers says he “needs competition like he needs to breathe”—you wonder where the chip on his shoulder might come from now. He’s 27, a two-time All-Star, two-time champion, and reigning Defensive Player of the year. In the arc of his career, his current position is not too far different from that of a player he faced off against in three straight finals, who similarly played a vitally important role in his team’s championship success and failure, even if no one would dare venture that he was the lineup’s best player: Kyrie Irving.
Both are embarking on something of a second act. In the shake-up that followed in the wake of Golden State's championship, Irving asked Cleveland to trade him, seemingly wanting out of LeBron James's sidecar. It was emblematic of the beginning of Green's encore, his team dealing the Cavs another L months after they took the Larry O'Brien back, the redeemed Warrior on the verge of a new season. And with Irving off to Boston where he'll be the star, instead of a star, you can't wonder if Green—the man who, finally, no one doubts—might want to follow Irving's example, to find a new mountain to climb.
“I got two takes on it," Green says, of the trade. "It's very easy to forget that everything you're doing, you have the best player—what most would say is the best player in the world next to you while you're doing it. And the other part of me would say, because I do, I respect the hell out of Kyrie for doing that. He put so much pressure on himself, when he could have easily just stayed right where he was and been exactly who he was. To say, ‘I want to show y'all that not only am I doing what I'm doing next to LeBron, but I can do even more not next to him.’ Just about everybody would take going to the Finals three years in a row, winning one and losing two. That means three years in a row you gave yourself a shot. That's all you can really ask for. [Kyrie said] I'm not OK with that. I want more. And that's a tough thing to do. It takes a lot of guts to do that.”
So would you want to do that?
“No. I'm fine with my role. Because I know what I bring to this team. And my goal has never been for it to be my team. It's not my dream and goal. So I don't knock him for his dream and goal. It's not mine.”
What is your dream and goal, then?
“To win championships and to continue to create a different lane for guys. If that's on a team with three other superstars, then that's on a team with three other superstars. Great. I'm fine with that. I don't feel the urge to be the guy. I think I am the guy in what I do. And that's enough for me.”
You’ve always had something to push back against. But now you’re at the top. What’s driving you?
“Everybody places you on this pedestal just to see you fall, or stomp on you. I've been through that before, with coming up from the 35th pick, to where I had come in 2016. And then everybody just stomped on me. But it taught me something that I'll never forget. I've seen so many people placed on this pedestal just to be stomped on: LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Shaq, Mike. Yeah, everybody's saying you're the best thing ever and you're expected to be great. But you're only expected to be great, so you can fall short of that expectation and everybody got something to talk about.
“That's motivation for me. Everybody wants to anoint us as the greatest team ever, or whatever. The Warriors are gonna win the next 5 championships. The fuck outta here. It's so hard to win a championship. And if you win three in a row, and everybody said you were going to win the next five, they're gonna shit on you.
“Because if everybody places you on the top, you only got one place to go. And that's down.”
