Draymond Green is outspoken.
That’s on full display in Clay Skipper’s GQ profile of the Warriors star. Green’s groin kicks, arrest and comfort in his role are all discussed. Green is nothing if not unapologetically Green throughout.
A sample:
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.”
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.”
The Warriors have an odd problem: They want to gloat about their dominance, but everyone accepts their inevitability – and blames them for it! Since signing Kevin Durant, Golden State is treated like an invincible villain.
I argued assuming the Warriors would win last year’s title was ignoring history. Overwhelming favorites tend not to live up to the hype. Winning a champion is hard as hell. But the way Golden State dominated, those pleas – even if they were correct – will fall on deaf ears.
So, Green is trying to play both sides – bragging about winning a league that everyone believes is stacked in the Warriors’ favor. If he figures out how to do that, I’ll truly be impressed by his gabbing ability.
