Draymond Green is no stranger to altercation. Oftentimes he seems to live for it on the basketball court, and it has cost him a lot of money and games over the years in the form of suspensions. It might’ve cost the Warriors a championship in 2016.
But he still loves to mix it up. It’s who he is. It’s who he’ll always be. And it has made him a Hall of Fame player and played a massive part in the Warriors becoming a dynasty. With Green, as long as he remains worth the trouble from an impact standpoint, you take the good with the bad.
It happened again Thursday night in the Warriors’ 107-104 over the Pistons in Detroit. Early in the fourth quarter, after Dennis Schroder went diving into the court-side seats for a loose ball, Green started getting a little chippy with Detroit’s Ron Holland. It wasn’t physical. They were just yapping. And you could tell Green starting to get revved up as teammates moved in to separate him from the scene.
In the past, even without anything getting physical, this has been more than enough action for the officials to hit Green, or all parties involved, with a technical foul. But this time, they weren’t so quick to pull their whistle. Instead, they let the yapping go back and forth and allowed the teammates to do the separating while exhibiting the same thing we ask players to exhibit in these situations. Restraint.
You don’t have to jump to a technical foul the instant someone’s competitive fire spreads even a little bit outside the lines, and after the game, Green, of all people, commended the officials for allowing the little, shall we say, get-together play out without bringing down the gavel.
“That’s what people want to see,” Green said after the game, referring to the players actually caring and competing hard and, heaven forbid, talking some trash to one another. “I thought the officials did a good job of handling that. They let it play out. They let guys talk. They broke it up. Then guys started talking again and they let it play out some more. Beautiful. This game should matter.
“We play in this league now, and it’s almost like you get turned into a robot,” Green continued. “You don’t see any of that stuff [heated exchanges]. And then everybody says the ratings are down. Yeah, of course. No s–t.”
Now, before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that there were technical fouls issued for this exchange, but it was after the initial dust-up, which was all talk, which they let go. Later, if you go back and watch the video again, Detroit’s Isaiah Stewart shoved Schroder away from the main scrum, and those two, since the interaction became physical, were hit with double techs.
You could argue they even could’ve let that go. It’s not like anyone was swinging. But fine, you want to get ahead of anything physically developing and cut it off before it starts. Fine. But Green is right about letting a little bit of chirping go down. And he may even have a small point about the larger connection to the well-chronicled decline in NBA ratings.
These ratings are a much bigger conversation with multiple layers of factors and available interpretations, but at some root level, yes, fans want to see honest, raw competition, and anyone who has ever competed at anything in their life knows that some occasional emotional spillover is inevitable. If that doesn’t happen, in fact, then nobody is competing with real emotion. And that shows up in the product. Fans aren’t dumb.
It doesn’t mean we have to go back to the Bill Laimbeer days of trying to behead players. But to Green’s point, within reason, the league needs to let these guys express their competitive emotions rather than asking them to be, in his words, robots.
Nobody wants to watch human beings going through the mechanical motions of being a basketball player. Talk a little trash. Get in one another’s face now and again. That’s how genuine disdain for an opponent is cultivated on the court, and even if we’re not going to go back to the Pistons-Bulls rivalry days for reasons beyond on-court clashes (namely, nobody plays for the same team long enough to really develop rivalries), some element of this on-court heat is necessary for a truly competitive entertaining product to come forth.
Granted, Green might be the wrong messenger here. No kidding, the guy who punched his own teammate and put Rudy Gobert in a chokehold wants officials to “let things play out.” But in this instance, and all the others like it, where no physicality is involved and all that’s happening is some emotional spillover from an honest place of competition, Green is right. Let it go.
The simple truth is when players get a little gassed up, so do fans. And that’s a good thing. The Malice in the Palace scared the league forever, and for good reason, but it’s been long enough and they have cracked down hard enough. If you want true competition, if you want the players to care about the regular-season games that have become largely meaningless in so many ways, then let them care, and accept at least the basic amount of confrontational tax that comes with that emotional investment.
