Golden State Warriors’ veteran forward Draymond Green is discussing the details behind a tiff with former Warriors’ teammate Kevin Durant, that occurred last season and led to a suspension for Green.
The incident caused Green to question his standing with the Warriors organization and with Warriors’ general manager Bob Myers.
Durant left the Warriors this summer in free agency to sign a deal with the Brooklyn Nets.
“I started to tell myself in my mind, ‘Wow, [Myers is] flipping on me,” Green said, during an appearance on the Woj Pod with ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
“And it just felt like, ‘Wow, OK, is this not the guy I’ve known for all these years? Is he turning on me?’ And I started to tell myself all of these things, and then everybody’s like, ‘Oh my God, the Warriors sided with Kevin Durant.’
“That was the hardest thing for me, because a lot of people don’t understand me. Bob does.”
Green was suspended for one game, without pay, back in November 2018 as a result of his on-court disagreement with Durant following the Warriors’ loss to the Los Angeles Clippers, a dispute that reportedly extended into the locker room.
“Where are you now with that?” Myers, who was also appearing on the podcast, asked Green during the interview “I don’t even know.”
“I just had to accept the fact that I was wrong. And once I was able to get over my stubbornness and accept the fact that I was wrong, I was able to move on. I lost [Durant’s] trust. How do I get that back? Not so we can win a championship or we can win some games … but I actually loved this guy, like that’s really my brother. And so not knowing what’s next in our relationship bothered me more.
“Bob and [head coach Steve Kerr], they told me, like, ‘You need to apologize to Kevin,’ before I got suspended. And I said, ‘No, I’m not apologizing because y’all telling me to apologize. I’m not gonna do that.’ And I didn’t. And I never apologized to him until I came to grips with myself. … Not because of some games or the team ain’t flowing right. But I can kind of see a look in my brother’s face that I have not seen. He’s hurt. How do I fix that? And that was what bothered me more than anything.”
“The only way I can go to bed after that decision was I thought what we did was right,” Myers said. “Sometimes in life you do the best you can. … And could it have been handled differently? I think it could be handled differently preceding that. If I had to go back, it wouldn’t have been after. It would have been before.
“What people don’t know — which is so hard to know, which requires time and energy — is Kevin and Draymond probably will be the closest guys. They’re going to be friends for their whole life like this. … In the aftermath when they spoke, they laid it out for each other and they’re like, OK, I got ya. Like, now I know where you’re coming from, from both sides. But that could have happened earlier and that would’ve prevented it.”
“The thing that bothered me most was not that Kevin was mad or not that people were saying I was wrong or not that we lost that particular game and definitely not that Kevin decided to leave,” Green said. “The thing that bothered me the most was that when, you know, when Kevin goes on his things he’s doing in the media or stuff and he says, oh, I wasn’t a part of that. Or, like, I was different than those guys. A part of it is like, no, he [was] one of us, and it pisses me off.”
Green will be an even bigger part of the Warriors this season, especially with Durant, Andre Iguodala, DeMarcus Cousins and other players now gone.
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