Draymond Green opens up about ‘rock bottom’ of Warriors career – NBC Sports Bay Area & California

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Draymond Green is a villain. A mentor. A bully. A charmer. He’s a basketball genius, a restless soul, a four-time NBA champion, a four-time NBA All-Star and a two-time Olympic gold medalist whose unruly conduct last season kept him off the court for 21 games.

His spasms of disorder did more than that. The vehement events of the 2023-24 NBA season hurt Draymond, his family and, lastly, the Golden State Warriors. It forced him to check himself. To seek rehabilitation for the emotions behind his on-court violence.

And now, 14 months after returning from his last suspension, words are coming off Draymond’s tongue with the same passion and conviction with which he has played basketball for 13 seasons with the Warriors. The conversation is about life, and he is the tour guide for a reflective journey down the long and sometimes dark hallways of his mind.

“The bottom? Man. Oh man. How do you find the bottom?” Green says on NBC Sports Bay Area’s “Dubs Talk” podcast, which debuted Friday. “There’s been some moments where … Wow. Wow.

“The bottom, I would have to say, for me personally, the bottom was last year. And the reason that was the bottom is basketball is one thing. You can talk about basketball all you want. I really don’t care. I know what I bring to the basketball game. I know what I’m capable of. I know what’s going on. So that don’t really bother me.

“But last year, my character was under attack. Who I am as a human being was under attack.”

The tipping point came on Dec. 12, 2023, when Green whacked Phoenix Suns center Jusuf Nurkić in the face in the third quarter of a Warriors-Suns game in Phoenix. That led to a suspension deemed “indefinite” because one month earlier, Green jumped Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert – whose arms were around Golden State’s Klay Thompson – from behind and put him in a modified chokehold. The Green-Gobert incident was a five-gamer, so the NBA felt it necessary to increase the suspension for Green’s strike on Nurkić.

Public reaction was swift and heavy with presumptions, with opinions undoubtedly prejudiced by…

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Source link : https://www.nbcsportsbayarea.com/nba/golden-state-warriors/draymond-green-suspension-rock-bottom-career/1838153/?partner=yahoo

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Publish date : 2025-03-28 07:02:00

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