Being Draymond (2007)

Watching the NBA's most volatile player struggle to keep his cool.

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I.

Back in 2007, the star player on the undefeated boys basketball team in Saginaw, Michigan, got called for a blocking foul that he didn’t agree with. He barked at the officials, picked up a technical foul, then got whistled for another technical and was ejected from the game and suspended for his team’s next game. Saginaw High led by double digits at the time, but after the opponent shot eight straight free throws, the game tightened up before Saginaw pulled out a victory.

“He’s young,” the star player’s coach said. “It’s a lesson that he needed to learn and we’ll all learn from this.”

Draymond Green is no longer young. He does not look like this anymore…

…and yet he is still endeavoring to incorporate the same lesson.

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II.

Draymond Green is 35 years old now, and his beard is mottled with enough gray that he’s starting to resemble one of those barber-shop denizens played by Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall in Coming to America. He has lived half a life since that game against Detroit Northwestern in 2007, and he has become one of the most skillful and smart players in professional basketball—and yet it is very possible, if you have watched the NBA over the past decade, that you have seen Draymond Green do something inexplicable on a basketball court. Over the course of a 13-year career in the NBA, he has largely earned the ill will he has engendered, because—while he is a highly introspective and intelligent and gregarious human being off the basketball court—he has repeatedly proven unable to contain his rage on a basketball court.

There was that time in 2016 during the NBA Finals when he flung an arm into LeBron James’ nether regions, thereby earning a suspension and arguably costing the Warriors a championship. There was the time he stepped on a Sacramento player’s chest in 2023, and the time he punched his own teammate during a practice, and the headlock he wrapped Utah’s Rudy Gobert in last year, and there is the fact that he’s been ejected 20 times over the course of his career, more than any other player this century.

A year ago, Green hit a new low when he was suspended indefinitely by the NBA after striking Suns’ center Jusuf Nurkic in the face. In the aftermath, wrote ESPN’s Ohm Youngmisuk, Green seemed to embrace a new level of introspection. He told Youngmisuk that he was undergoing therapy, and that he was discovering how his thought patterns had led him to this place, and how so much of his attitude was wrapped up in the toxic masculinity he’d grown up with.

“Starting therapy was f---ing hard,” he told Youngmisuk. “Because I'm from Saginaw, Michigan. I'm from an all-Black neighborhood that you don't go to therapy or you're f---ing weak. So you're retraining a brain that's been thinking a certain way for 30 years. The last thing you do growing up on the north side of Saginaw is [something that is perceived as] weak.”

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III.

As I write this, Draymond Green and the Golden State Warriors are locked in a punishing and violent first-round playoff series against the Houston Rockets. It is a fascinating contrast of styles, and it is compelling to watch: The Rockets’ strategy is to bog down the game itself, to obscure the artistry and elegance of Stephen Curry by devolving each possession into a wrestling match. Amid this volcanic back-and-forth, perhaps the most fascinating part is the way all that naked aggression is weighing on Draymond Green. In the Warriors’ Game 4 victory, he picked up a technical foul, and then nearly got ejected after he committed another hard foul. He is trying to be himself while also trying to stay out of trouble. He is struggling not to give in to the needless anger that has so often short-circuited his career; you can almost hear him repeating zen mantras inside his head.

“It’s easy for everybody on the outside to say, well then don't do that stuff,” Green’s coach, Steve Kerr, told Youngmisuk. “But…his game lives on the edge of passion and rage, and he has to find that balance.”

And in that way, Draymond Green has never been so relatable.

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IV.

This week, an NBC News Poll asked Americans to describe their emotions about the current presidential administration. Fifty-one percent said their feelings were negative, and 23 percent—including more than half of Democrats—said they were “furious,” a number that outweighed every other emotion.