Nevius: Warriors’ Draymond Green lets temper get the best of him, again

The Warriors have been putting up with Draymond Green’s unreasonable, uncontrollable temper for 11 years.

Now it is fair to wonder if they have been enabling him.

If you haven’t seen the video of Green sucker-punching Jordan Poole this week, there’s no need. It is all there in the descriptions. Green walks over to Poole during a scrimmage, instigates a chest bump and when Poole shoves him away, Green uncorks a right-handed haymaker that crumples Poole and sends him to the floor.

It was ugly. It was terrible. It was a cheap-shot overreaction that was completely devoid of any thought of consequences.

Poole could easily have been badly injured, a broken nose or fractured eye socket. And Green, in his contract year and fancying himself a budding media star, punched his career in the mouth.

The Warriors are said to be debating whether or not to offer the 32-year-old forward a big, new contract. It’s not too much to suggest that this time, Green might have delivered the final straw personally.

As for media, teams often look the other way when players screw up, but image means more when your career depends on attracting followers.

It was a dumb, impulsive, bonehead move. Grown men, especially those with impressionable children, do not punch co-workers in the mouth. That’s how you get fired and maybe arrested.

Whatever made Green think he could get away with that?

Well, maybe because he’s gotten away with it over and over.

Granted, some of it seems relatively harmless. The team plays it off with a wink and “that’s just Draymond.”

Green led the NBA in technical fouls in 2016 and 2019. He’s been in the top five among tech foul committers every year but 2015.

And we all know how those play out. Green is upset at a foul call. Often correctly, it should be said, but that’s how these things go. The refs miss some. Move on.

But Green won’t let it go. He follows the official around the floor, talking, talking, hassling.

And he gets T’d up. So far, it all follows the standard script. Player crosses a line, the ref gives him a T and on with the game.

But sometimes Green keeps after it. He gets a second technical and is ejected. Or he does something over the line.

He was suspended from Game 5 of the 2016 Finals for a flagrant foul on LeBron James.

And sometimes, like Game 2 of the 2022 Finals with Boston, he got one T and was dangerously close to a second with his antics. (National pundits complained he should have been ejected.)

In public, the Warriors chalk it up to Green’s “high-strung” nature. They call him the heartbeat of the locker room. Players like Klay Thompson joke that if you haven’t been yelled at by Draymond, you’re not on the floor.

But the team knows there’s more to this. Steve Kerr has talked to Green about his tendency for Green to “emotionally hijack” the team.

After Green apologized Thursday, the Warriors kept him away from practice — the third time he’s been disciplined by the team. They’ve got to be getting tired of this.

The first was the infamous Green-Steve Kerr blowup during halftime of a game in Oklahoma City in 2016. Green lost it in the locker room, yelling at Kerr so vociferously that the two reportedly almost came to blows.

We know that because the game was nationally televised and ESPN sideline reporter Lisa Salters was standing outside the Warriors’ dressing room.

“One of the players went on a profanity-laced tirade,” Salters said at the time. “I did not hear what precipitated it. But he was yelling so loudly I could hear everything he was saying.”

Not only was Green suspended after that, but Kerr took it seriously – to the point that the next year, after another on-court incident, the coach wrote Green a three-page letter, trying to explain himself.

And you can see why. Green didn’t become Defensive Player of the Year by accident. He’s a legitimately elite defender. And he makes the Warriors’ defense better. They’ve won four titles in eight years.

But you have to balance that with his tendency to undermine the team.

He kicked OKC center Steven Adams in the groin in the 2016 Western Conference Finals. He got into it with Boston’s Grant Williams in this year’s Finals and got a T.

Neither of those incidents helped the team.

And then there was the 2016 bar fight in Michigan, where he was arrested and briefly jailed for a fight with a Michigan State football player.

The details have a familiar ring. The player said they got into a verbal confrontation when Green suddenly punched him.

The second team suspension was in 2018, after the infamous Kevin Durant blowup.

After a disagreement about an end-of-game sequence, Green was upset that Durant complained to him. Green went off, telling Durant – who was reportedly deciding whether to stay with the team or not – “We don’t need you. We won without you. Leave.”

Which was definitely not the message the Warriors wanted to send. And you can tell me Durant and Green have patched it all up, but it sure looks from here like one of the reasons the famously thin-skinned Durant didn’t re-sign was that Green rant.

And now there’s this.

Obviously, Poole isn’t going to forget it. Other players, like team leader Steph Curry, are going to have to answer more questions about the incident, about Green and team unity. The question of whether to re-sign Green will hover over the rest of the year.

It’s the last thing this team needed heading into a new season.

But it shouldn’t be unexpected. They’ve seen this before.

Contact C.W. Nevius at cw.nevius@pressdemocrat.com. Twitter: @cwnevius