Draymond Green is no victim, even though the NBA overpoliced his stomping foolishness. Measured against the sport’s long playoff history of elbows and shoves, kicks and punches, body slams and clotheslines, Green’s reckless instinct to break free of a leg-grabbing Domantas Sabonis by using his opponent’s chest as a trampoline doesn’t rank all that high on the list of unhinged postseason antics. Yet Green will serve a one-game suspension anyway, mostly because he needs the timeout to realize something: He has maxed out the “Draymond being Draymond” card.
Looking at the incident in isolation, it may seem to be evidence the game has gotten too soft. Such a reaction is facile. This wasn’t a battle over basketball’s culture. This was a forceful rebuke of Green, who rarely encounters a line he won’t cross and whose behavior has been tolerated for so long he has shattered perceptions of how to judge him fairly.
Green wasn’t punished merely for a violent moment. In a league that has absorbed the competitive nastiness of Bill Laimbeer and Ron Artest and John Stockton and Charles Oakley, Green may be the first player sent home for repeated insolence. Somewhere, Dennis Rodman and Karl Malone are floored — and not because they wrestled to the ground.
This time, Draymond being Draymond wasn’t an acceptable excuse.
In a peculiar news dump late Tuesday night, the NBA ended the first paragraph of the announcement with this controversial but clarifying sentence: “The suspension was based in part on Green’s history of unsportsmanlike acts.”
Joe Dumars, the NBA executive vice president and head of basketball operations, later expounded.
“Here’s what it came down to: excessive and over-the-top actions, conduct detrimental and a repeat offender,” Dumars told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski. “That’s what separates this where you end up with a suspension.”
Over 11 seasons, Green has achieved stardom and won four championships with the Golden State Warriors in a distinctive and polarizing manner. He’s an admirable and incomparable talent — the best all-around defensive player of the past decade, an enforcer with the skill to lead his team in assists, a playmaker for an all-time great offense who makes an impact without scoring. He doesn’t beat opponents; he breaks them. He embodies Saginaw, Mich., with a level of mental and physical toughness that adds an irascible dimension to the Warriors’ dynasty. Most of the time, he’s in control even when he appears out of it. In the Finals last year, he complemented Stephen Curry’s greatness and Andrew Wiggins’s athleticism with a kind of tenacity that basically punked the Boston Celtics out of a championship. But it’s impossible for Green to manage that fire all the time.
The magnificent player is also a wrecking ball who ranks annually among the league leaders in technical fouls. Green has been ejected from 17 games in his career. This will be his fourth suspension. But for all the trouble he has gotten into, Green has been able to avoid so much more. He epitomizes the notion that the referees can’t call everything. For Green, that includes excessive badgering of officials, even after he has already received one technical, because the referees are often reluctant to influence outcomes by tossing him. And then there are the physical incidents, most infamously kicks and hits to the groin. Before the season, his temper led him to shove and punch teammate Jordan Poole during practice.
Do the math on all the problems and repercussions, and Green still comes out ahead. Account for the reality that talented players always get away with more, and Green is still too far ahead. With Golden State trailing the young and assured Sacramento Kings 2-0 in their first-round series, it’s an awful time for Green to miss a critical Game 3. It’s understandable why Warriors fans and a general audience that craves a long series are upset by what looks like a punitive disciplinary action. But it’s wasted emotion to feel sorry for Green, whose defiant barking at the Golden 1 Center crowd and dismissiveness of the stomp in interviews afterward made the problem worse.
Warriors’ Draymond Green egging on Kings fans after stepping on Domantas Sabonis pic.twitter.com/ya0kXOVt37
— Ben Golliver (@BenGolliver) April 18, 2023
He did all that with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver in attendance. With the boss in Sacramento, Green might as well have been saying, “I wish the NBA would do something to me.” Well, the NBA just did. And when Dumars, the Detroit Pistons legend and stately member of the Bad Boys, talks about Green being a repeat offender, he’s emphasizing the defiance.
Green acts as though he can get away with anything. The league felt it had to make a counterpoint. It had to reintroduce him to reality.
Green didn’t need to stomp on Sabonis to get the center to let loose. Richard Jefferson said on ESPN that he would’ve reacted with a kick. Green wouldn’t have been suspended for trying to kick himself free. The in-game ejection would’ve been sufficient. But he wanted to try to intimidate Sabonis, and he figured that all would be fine because both players did something wrong.
Instead, the NBA responded to a stomp with what many consider an overstep. Karma is a better way to describe it.
Green has been begging for this humbling. In time, he might end up being remorseful about putting himself in a position to miss a must-win game. He can be contrite and thoughtful upon reflection. You saw that side of him once he realized the implications for being suspended for Game 5 of the 2016 Finals after hitting LeBron James in the groin. He quickly regretted altering the Warriors’ chemistry — and making this repeat championship bid so stressful — when he attacked Poole.
Right now, though, Green is just exiled from competition at a time when the Warriors, already playing small ball with him in the lineup, badly need him to anchor their defense. This is different from missing a game in the 2016 Finals, which Green believes may have cost those 73-9 Warriors a title. This is different from his verbal tirade against Kevin Durant during the 2018-19 season, Durant’s final year in Golden State. This is different from going after Poole.
Those iterations of Golden State had time to recover, and for the most part they were able to move past another bout of Draymond being Draymond. These Warriors — too worn on one side of the roster, too green on the other — are clinging to their dynasty tighter than Sabonis gripped Green’s leg.
And so Green, their imitable firebrand, didn’t just press his size-15 sneakers into the sternum of a foe. He stomped down his own team, too, and if everything doesn’t go just right from here, his intractable passion may have squished a legendary run.