In the backyard of Draymond Green’s $10 million home in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood, where white columns and a marble patio overlook the greenest of grass, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr chatted with the heartbeat of his team.

Hours earlier, the Warriors had landed in Los Angeles to a whirlwind of drama. The night before, Dec. 12 in Phoenix, Green had protested an uncalled foul by spinning and flailing his arms. He struck Suns center Jusuf Nurkić in the face, incurring a Flagrant 2 foul and automatic ejection. This was just shy of a month after his previous Flagrant 2, a five-second chokehold of Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert that landed Green a five-game suspension and a promise of harsher future league penalties.

So while the basketball world waited for the league’s latest punishment — an indefinite suspension that ended up lasting 12 games — and before the Warriors took on the host Clippers, Kerr visited Green for their latest heart-to-heart talk. These two have argued and debated. They’ve cursed each other out. They’ve strategized together. Bared their souls to one another. On this day, they cried together.

And Kerr came equipped with an appeal: “I want you to end this the right way. I want us to end this the right way.”

Discussing the end strikes a chord with Green. Kerr knew it would. He’s spent the last five years in the trenches with Green, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, warding off the inevitable. Fighting against basketball mortality. The way last season ended, and how this one has gone, they can hardly deny the end is nearing. Stalking them. They can feel its breath.

“We’re in a position where we’re getting older, trying to defend everything that we’ve done over the last decade,” Kerr said recently after practice, explaining his pitch to Green. “Let’s do it the right way. Let’s do it with dignity. Let’s do it with competitive desire. Let’s do it joyfully. What this team has been built on, and I think what attracts a lot of our fans, it’s not just the style but it’s the joy that the players feel, the competitive desire that sort of complements that. It’s been a wonderful combination.”

Since the NBA went to a two-round draft in 1989, only three players have made the Hall of Fame who were not selected in the first round: Toni Kukoč, Ben Wallace and Manu Ginobili. Two-time MVP Nikola Jokić is sure to join them. But not before Green, the No. 35 pick in the 2012 NBA Draft. His next decade was worthy of a documentary.

That’s why it’s imperative for the 33-year-old Green, who is expected to return to game action Monday and has three years and over $77 million remaining on his contract, to end his career right. Because finality with a shot of regret is too strong an elixir. Over the last 15 months, he has been choreographing a conclusion that sullies the quality of his journey. His prominence has become more about flagrants and flails, suspensions and stomps, petulance and punches.

Green’s legacy should be a glorious one. An improbable legend, a four-time NBA champion born of the rare combination of skill, intellect and toughness. The chubby kid from rusty Saginaw, Mich., forged himself into an all-time great. A testament to the capacity of will, of what sports can blossom from unlikely soils.

“He was 285 pounds when I first got him,” said Tom Izzo, who coached Green at Michigan State.

Instead, his reputation is currently more about the problems he causes than the championship solutions he has delivered. But his teammates believe, his coach believes, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and his enforcer, executive vice president Joe Dumars, believe there is a Draymond in there worth fighting to save. A legacy that deserves better punctuation.

“When I look back at these situations,” Green said last week, “it’s like, ‘Can I remove the antics?’ I am very confident I can remove the antics. And I am very confident if I do, no one is worried about how I play the game of basketball, how I carry myself in the game of basketball. It’s the antics. That’s the focus. It’s not changing who I am completely. You don’t change the spots on a leopard.”

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Kevon Looney’s AAU coach, Shelby Parrish, was in the Bay Area visiting, not long after Looney was drafted in 2015. Looney was showing his youth coach around and, next thing he knew, Green was hanging out with coach Parrish. They talked for at least an hour.

Then Green invited Looney and his guests to hang out at Halftime Sports Bar in Oakland. In the middle of the day, they were playing dominoes with Green. Parrish had the memory of a lifetime.

“The reason that he’s allowed to yell at people,” Looney said of Green, “and get animated is because he only wants to win and he puts the time in off the court. … When I first got here, any time there was a rookie, anytime somebody new came to the team, he’s the first person to take them in and take them out. Show ’em the town. Put them in touch with the people they need to know. That’s what he did for me. All my family and friends, he made them feel comfortable, like they were his family.”

Back in October, Trayce Jackson-Davis worked out in the team’s practice facility on the ground floor of Chase Center. The rookie big man, who turns 24 in February, was still getting accustomed to life in the NBA when he learned he would start at center against Sacramento in the third preseason game. Green, sidelined with a sprained left ankle, interrupted the rookie’s workout. He gave Jackson-Davis 10 minutes of pointers on defending Kings big man Domantas Sabonis. The four-time champion schooling the No. 57 pick. Green walked through how to give Sabonis space, how to hold his ground when Sabonis lowers his shoulder or digs in his elbow, and how to get into Sabonis’ body on rebounds.

“It was great, especially how nervous I was,” Jackson-Davis said, “being so early in the season. The vets, at that time, weren’t around. We hadn’t developed relationships yet. He didn’t have to do that. But it helped. Especially in the first quarter, I guarded him really well.”

The dynamics of the Warriors, of locker rooms, of relationships within teams helps explain why, even after his laundry list of violations over the years, Green is still a Warrior. Still welcomed. Still redeemable.

Loyalty.

It sounds like an oxymoron for a player who keeps letting his team down. Green’s inability to control himself and make sure he’s available for a team that desperately needs him could be seen as disloyalty. Watching the Warriors’ defense decline significantly without him underscores how much his absence hurts the Warriors.

“Part of that complexity,” Kerr explained, “is this intense loyalty to the team and to the organization, to his coaches. He’s loyal to me. We’ve definitely had our share of run-ins, but it’s all in the name of trying to win.”

“I think the people that he trusts and he believes in, he’d die for ’em,” Izzo said. “I know that sounds like a drastic statement. I believe it. I really do.”

Green is a dichotomy. Most aren’t privy to the countless impactful moments behind the scenes. That character is behind the patience he receives within the organization. It also fuels the hope he can rectify his name.

As Looney said, “There is way more good than bad.”

The one incident Looney doesn’t get behind, the one the Warriors all agree was the most wrong Green has been, was punching Jordan Poole in October 2022. Fresh off of a summer of basking in championship glory, Green again changed the narrative about himself when he attacked Poole in practice in an altercation that escalated too far. The video leak made it a permanent mark on Green’s record.

Striking Poole wasn’t motivated by winning, or loyalty, or getting the most out of his teammates. Of all the things Green has done, it’s the sin that’s been forgiven but not forgotten. And it continues to haunt the Warriors, as the spark of the more volatile version of Green that has been suspended four times for a total of 19 games in the last 10 months.

Green wasn’t suspended for the Poole punch. At the time, the Warriors believed a suspension wasn’t enough. They wanted him to live in the discomfort he caused. They kept his locker next to Poole, perhaps hoping they would reconcile. In the end, it just kept the discomfort alive, and Green had to live with it. His punishment was having to earn back the trust.

He did eventually. But accumulation is now a factor. Earlier in his career, Green could just go dominate and shut everyone up. That’s not so easy anymore. As the antics have increased, the winning has lessened. Now that the NBA is involved and increasingly punitive, the price of his antics is greater than it’s ever been. Green’s problems have become less a caveat of success and more a barricade in the way of it.

“Part of what drives Draymond is the insecurity that we all have in us,” Kerr said. “Most people don’t really want to admit vulnerability. He’s not Steph Curry. He’s not LeBron James. He can’t just ride on, ‘Well, I’ll go get 25 tonight.’ For him to play well, he has to be all in, emotionally and physically and spiritually. And there are times where And there are times where because it’s an 82-game season with all the drama, all the BS that’s out there … it eats at him. And then he can’t just rely on that skill … so then he’ll lash out. And when he lashes out, there’s repercussions.”

If anybody could be done with Green and his antics, it’s Kerr. But they’re so much alike, which Kerr made clear to Green in that backyard talk. Kerr, a five-time NBA champion as a player, knows what’s it like to become so maddened by his competitive drive. He’s been where Green is, so he knows where Green needs to go to deal with that consuming drive.

“It’s kind of deep s—, you know, that we’re talking about,” Kerr said. “Being vulnerable. That’s one of the things I’m encouraging him to do. Be more vulnerable. Just admit you’re wrong. There’s a power in that, you know? If he does, then he doesn’t have to explain himself. And if he’s not explaining himself, I think people will have more sympathy.”

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Green was expecting to be a first-round pick in 2012. He played four seasons at Michigan State, played in two Final Fours and as a senior was a consensus All-American.

But Green didn’t fit the NBA mold. He was seen as a “tweener” — a player whose combination of size and skill left him between the traditional positions. The 6-foot, 7 1/2-inch Green was considered too small to be a power forward and not athletic enough to be a small forward. None of his measurements added up to what he’s become.

But his immeasurables were off the charts. And the No. 1 attribute working on his behalf is still the thing mentioned first about him today. Draymond is synonymous with winning.

“You just don’t have that many people anymore for whom winning is the most important thing,” Izzo said. “You know, sometimes I get mad at him because his podcast takes up time. … But all these players have distractions. But with him, it’s about winning. If you need him to set a screen, get a rebound, make a pass, take a shot, never take a shot — whatever it is. I just don’t know enough people that put winning as the priority.”

When the Warriors drafted him in the second round, it was the perfect match. A franchise needing to build a winning culture landed a player with the formula it lacked. High basketball IQ. Defensive genius and leadership. Natural talent. Heart. And it was on display immediately.

At Summer League in 2012, the Warriors’ young players were in Las Vegas practicing and playing some high-intensity scrimmages. Harrison Barnes was the lottery pick that year. Festus Ezeli was the Warriors’ other first-round pick. Green wasn’t one of the prized young talents. Jeremy Tyler, a former high school sensation who was selected in the second round in 2011, was assigned to be Green’s mentor. That was until Tyler called a foul during the scrimmage in Las Vegas that Green thought was weak and a sign of his softness.

“He dropped him as his vet,” Barnes recalled in an interview with the Mercury News in 2015. “He said Jeremy couldn’t be his vet anymore.”

Months later, when the full team got together for pickup runs before training camp, Green was going at veteran David Lee, the Warriors’ lone All-Star at the time.

Green was this way at Civitan Recreation Center in Saginaw, when he was the little guy earning his keep on the court with the older kids. He was this way at Saginaw High, when he led his school to two state championships and a top-five national ranking as a senior. He was this way as a freshman at Michigan State, when he played six minutes in his debut and by the end of the season was a rotation player in the national championship game.

“A lot of my respect for Draymond comes from on the court,” Looney said. “I always took pride in being a tough guy, being tenacious, being relentless, always showing up and holding yourself accountable. And I always see him sacrifice the most. As a young player, I admired that. He’ll make every play.”

Before the antics, winning was Green’s clear legacy. It’s how he garnered respect, awe even. It’s his worth in a league full of bigger, more athletic and more talented players. It’s how he made four All-Star Games and earned two All-NBA nods, eight All-NBA Defense selections and a Defensive Player of the Year award.

“He’s the ultimate winner,” Kerr said. “A champion. This whole business is about winning. … Draymond, even though he can be hard to coach because of emotion, he is actually easy to coach because of his brain and his loyalty and his fight and his competitive drive. I’ll take those guys every day of the week.”

None of the Warriors’ success happens without Green. That’s the declaration in Kerr’s appeal to end the right way.

As the heartbeat, Green has shown he can will the Warriors to a higher level, but he’s also shown he can drag them into the muck. The same fire he used to help refine the Warriors into a dynasty has proven hot enough to burn what they’ve built.

Now, the journey begins, again, to see if the Warriors can rely on Green. If the reflection takes. If the counseling and growth sticks. If so, the Warriors can go out with class, celebrated for their valiance. That would fit their story, and Green’s. But they can’t end this right without him.

“My thing with him now is,” Izzo said, “can you take these last three years or whatever, and just focus in on this. Really leave the legacy that you deserve to have. And that’s as one of the greatest winners. That’s one of the tougher competitors. That’s a very good teammate.”

(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photo: Jane Tyska / Digital First Media / East Bay Times / Getty Images) 

The NBA has reinstated Golden State Warriors star Draymond Green after his 12-game suspension, the league announced Saturday. Green has been undergoing counseling for several weeks and holding progress meetings with the league and Warriors.

“During the period of his suspension, which began on December 14 and resulted in him missing 12 games, Green completed steps that demonstrated his commitment to conforming his conduct to the standards expected of NBA players,” said Joe Dumars, executive vice president and head of the NBA. basketball operations for the NBA, a statement said.

“He has had discussions with an advisor and has held multiple joint meetings with representatives from the NBA, the Warriors and the National Basketball Players Association, both of which will continue throughout the season.”

The following was released by the NBA. pic.twitter.com/dlFtd7okI7

— NBA Communications (@NBAPR) January 6, 2024

The four-time NBA champion was suspended indefinitely after punching Suns center Jusuf Nurkić in the face during the Warriors’ Dec. 12 game against Phoenix. Golden State has gone 7-5 in Green’s absence and has a 17-18 record.

What is the significance of Green’s return?

The Warriors get their best defenseman back. He is a floor coordinator and he is missed.

The Warriors had a defensive rating of 119.8 during his 12-game absence, eighth-worst in the NBA during that stretch. They’ve solved some early-season offensive issues by reducing their turnovers while picking up their pace, but this team can’t be taken seriously until it starts getting more stops. No one in the world – if eligible and physically fit – will help you get stops better than Green. — Anthony Slater, Warriors senior writer

When does he come back?

Green and Rick Celebrini, the team’s chief medical decision maker, will determine that. There will be some kind of scaling up process. He won’t play at home against the Toronto Raptors on Sunday, although Green is eligible. The Warriors will then get two days off before a home game on Wednesday against the Pelicans and then begin a four-game road trip in Chicago next Friday evening. — Leidekker

Biggest Green-related question upon his return

Whose minutes does he get and how long can he stay out of the competition’s sights? Jonathan Kuminga started all twelve games that Green missed and has performed well enough to keep his spot and heavy minutes load. He played just a career-high 36 minutes in the previous match.

It’s possible the Warriors move Green back into the fold and could theoretically make him their starting center. The night he committed the foul on Nurkić, Kuminga had replaced Kevon Looney in the starting line-up to open the second half and Green had moved up to fifth. — Leidekker

Required reading

(Photo: Tony Ding/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green has begun counseling and is expected to remain sidelined for at least the next three weeks due to suspension, league sources said.

The NBA announced an indefinite suspension for Green on Wednesday for punching Phoenix Suns center Jusuf Nurkić in the face during a game the night before. Joe Dumars, the NBA’s executive vice president and chief basketball operations officer, said in a statement that Green’s “repeated history of unsportsmanlike conduct” was a factor in the decision.

League sources said Green, 33, was expected to receive counseling and work with the Warriors and the NBA while suspended. People around Green and the organization said the four-time NBA champion has shown understanding and willingness to undergo the process necessary to return to the team at full capacity. These sources declined to reveal the details of Green’s guidance out of respect for his privacy.

A three-week term would mean his suspension would be approximately twelve games.

Green’s latest incident – ​​his 20th ejection of his career – came in the third quarter of Tuesday’s game between the Warriors and Suns. Green appeared to struggle for post positioning against Nurkić near the corner, turned and nailed Nurkić in the face with a wild right arm. Nurkić fell and stayed down for about a minute.

Officials stopped the game for a review, which didn’t take long. Green was ejected and didn’t even contest it. He immediately ran to the locker room.

After the match, Green apologized to Nurkić. He said it was unintentional and that he was trying to sell a foul by waving his arms.

“As you know, I am not one to apologize for the things I intended to do, but I do apologize to Jusuf. Because I didn’t mean to hit him,” Green said. “I sell phone calls with my arms.”

Green’s suspension is the sixth of his NBA career and his second this season. The league also suspended Green for five games in November for his involvement in an altercation against the Minnesota Timberwolves when Green deadlocked Rudy Gobert. Last season, he served two separate one-game suspensions: once for 16 technical fouls, and a second time in the playoffs for stepping on Sacramento Kings power forward Domantas Sabonis.

Warriors coach Steve Kerr said he thought an indefinite suspension for Green made sense to help the 12th-year veteran make a change.

“For me, this is about more than basketball. It’s about helping Draymond,” Kerr said. “I think this is an opportunity for Draymond to take a step back and make a change in his approach and his life, and that’s not easy. That’s not something where you say, ‘Okay, five games and he’ll be fine.'”

The Warriors (12-14) are 2-1 since Green’s exclusion. During his previous five-match suspension, the score was 2-3.

Required reading

(Photo: Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)

He kept talking about the carry.

This was Draymond Green’s first game back from his five-game suspension, with the Golden State Warriors forward completing his league-mandated discipline by dragging Rudy Gobert across the court as if he were playing hoops on a WWE stage. He was 13 months removed from the infamous Jordan Poole punch, six months removed from Domantas Sabonis’ foot stomp and two weeks removed from Jusuf Nurkić’s swinging punch against the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night that led to the NBA issuing him a suspended indefinitely the next day. . And Green, whose struggling Warriors had led the Sacramento Kings for almost the entire rematch of playoff opponents on Nov. 28, was once again consumed by his own intensity.

No matter what was happening around him, Green kept going on about how Malik Monk had held the ball with his hand as he came off the floor and — like so many thousands of NBA players before him — wasn’t penalized. He replayed Monk’s carry in dramatic form for the officials — the same one he’d been chewing on for nearly a minute when a Trey Lyles elbow wasn’t called and forced Green to flop — and drew a technical foul on Mitchell Ervin that called the ball turned over. energy in the building. But that didn’t stop Green from continuing.

After Green was taken out of the game seconds later, he told Warriors coach Steve Kerr everything about what Monk had done. He continued his anti-carrying crusade on the bench, where Green engaged in a spirited shouting match with player development coach Anthony Vereen that actually pointed the finger in Green’s direction and was so tense that Jonathan Kuminga and several others decided to take on the role of peacemakers to play. . Meanwhile, a Kings comeback unfolded after trailing by 24 points on the floor. The frustration on the faces of several Warriors nearby, including Klay Thompson, was clearly visible. And with good reason.

Then again, as has been the case so often lately, Green was seemingly obsessed with the micro rather than the macro. With the game, the season and the back of their legendary dynasty on the line, Green became so emotionally distraught that he forgot to think about the long-term consequences of his actions. The more surprising part, and what seemed to leave the door wide open for future incidents, was that Green felt so comfortable with this level of perk, as the kids say, even after the two ejections and the five-match suspension that had already made life unnecessarily difficult for his team this season.

“The Warriors … have to keep their poise and play basketball,” TNT announcer Stan Van Gundy had said on the broadcast during that stretch, which led to the Kings’ 124-123 victory.

By ‘Warriors’ he of course meant Green. And what they really need, with the February 8 trade deadline looming, is to finally start answering the tough questions that everyone inside the Chase Center seems to want to ignore.

Where is this all going? And with a $400 million payroll (including luxury taxes) hanging over their heads, when would Warriors owner Joe Lacob decide it’s time for a major change? As one front-office executive put it in the wake of Green’s leveling of Nurkić, “I can imagine some reassessments (taking place now).”

But if winning titles is the end goal for all of them – and it is – then the uncomfortable truth is that this respected group of future Hall of Famers seems incapable of getting anywhere close. They are getting beaten most nights, having lost 12 of their last 17 after starting 5-1. They look broken in ways that go far beyond the box score, with a litany of late-game situations having gone south during this brutal start. They look… cooked.

Everyone except Chef Curry, of course. And that’s just not enough.

Steph is still Steph, 35 years old and all. But the 33-year-old Thompson, whose looming free agency has created a new stress point after he and the Warriors failed to agree on an extension, is having his worst year in more than a decade on both sides of the rankings. The 33-year-old Green, who was signed to a four-year, $100 million contract in the summer, can still play at a high level but is still a problem because (see above).

The production of Andrew Wiggins, whose renaissance was such a key factor in their 2022 title run, has dropped dramatically across the board. And how does this add to the uncertainty: You have a coach in Kerr whose contract expires after this season and a general manager in Mike Dunleavy Jr., who in his first season is filling the huge shoes left by the departed Bob Myers.

Everywhere I go these days there are human reminders of how much the Warriors world has changed. You’ll now see Myers on the media side as an ESPN analyst, the retired Andre Iguodala leading the players’ union as executive director and former Warriors player/front office executive Shaun Livingston joining his old teammate in the NBPA. These are all people who got through to Groen in the past, men whose credibility came in handy on the many occasions when a Green-inspired crisis would inevitably break out.

That matters, of course, because it’s the absence of a calming effect that could force these Warriors to make tough decisions sooner than they’d hoped. It’s hard to keep trudging forward when the coals are so hot under your feet. You could see that dynamic play in real time in the Sacramento game, where it was so clear that no one on this team — including Steph — could convince Green to shift his energy in a more positive direction for the sake of safety. Greater good.

We’ll never know what would have happened if the Warriors had taken a harder line on Green in recent years, especially after the Poole punch two October ago. He was never suspended for that ugly act, as the Warriors instead decided to fine him, while greenlighting a short sabbatical that ended just in time for the start of the regular season. The league, which in that case showed respect for the Warriors’ celebrated culture and opted to let the organization handle the situation, remained on the sidelines.

In retrospect, that was clearly a mistake. A soft precedent was set, and the Warriors would later reaffirm their loyalty to Green by re-signing him last summer, not long before trading Poole to the Washington Wizards (in the three-team deal that netted them Chris Paul).

But it no longer matters how they got here. The frequency of incidents involving Green, and the near-constant tension for everyone involved, makes it difficult to imagine this group facing the retirement sunset together.

Not for this price. Not with these goals. And especially not if Green single-handedly sabotages their twilight years in this way.

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(Photo: Christian Petersen/Getty Images)