Good morning. Free Brittney Griner. Let’s basketball.

Woman With Mustard Pot, Pablo Picasso, 1910

Draymond Green is a very distracting player to watch. You basically cannot pay attention to him and keep tabs on anything else that happens on the court. It’s either a virtuoso actor in a performance that blots out everyone else with their radiance, or it’s the race car driver just trying to trade some point you can’t look away from out of a morbid curiosity.

Green, to put it lightly, has an enormous role in everything the Warriors do, a lot of weight in each game. He has the trust of Stephen Curry, one of the greatest to ever play, and Steve Kerr. His teammates up and down the roster listen to him.

And … in the past we have definitely seen him distracted, unenthused, dare-I-say lazy. I can recall two times at which we’ve seen Green play poorly for reasons entirely within his control: the 2016 Olympics and the 2019-20 Warriors season. In Rio, one presumes Green did not think he was going to play enough to hurt the Americans (he didn’t) and spent more time enjoying the once-in-a-lifetime experience (he did, I presume). He was really bad in that context and in that tournament. Still won the gold.

Green has admitted he lost motivation in 2019-20 with Kevin Durant gone, Klay Thompson out for the year and Steph Curry injured early on. The Warriors were the worst team in the league, and Green — three rings in at that point — could not fake caring about that. He was such a lesser player in that context that many started believing it was in part a legitimate sign of the downside of his career.

The Green we are seeing in this Finals is not that Green. He is prepared. He’s just at a loss, as he has sometimes been over the years. He’s been a top-five defender in his generation, but he still has his issues. He was never Kerr’s first choice on LeBron James, for example; Andre Iguodala won a Finals MVP off of holding LeBron to 36-13-9. Kawhi Leonard gave him lots of trouble in the 2019 Finals. And against these Celtics — with Robert Williams III’s size and bounce, with Jaylen Brown’s agility and strength, with Jayson Tatum’s smooth length, with the entire team’s refusal to be pushed around — Green’s having some trouble.

It happens. No one ever said Green could stop everyone. Andrew Wiggins has been a much more effective defender against Brown and Tatum, at least based on these eyes, but you can attribute that to Wiggins’ superior length and athleticism. That’s the edge Boston has over Green and the other Warriors; Wiggins can match it. Jonathan Kuminga could theoretically match it, too, if he gets a chance.

Steve Jones Jr. @stevejones20

You know what, let's watch some Warriors/Celtics Game 3.

June 9th 2022

6 Retweets71 Likes

Why the Sports Content Industrial Complex insists trying to find some alternate explanation for why the Warriors lost Game 3 and why Green hasn’t been as effective in this series than in prior series — some explanation that strips credit for how the Celtics are playing, how their best players have developed, how the team has been built — is beyond me. I presume that like Green knows what he’s doing, the producers at ESPN and everywhere else know what they are doing. It’s actually pretty easy to fall into Look At Me Mindset in the media — you can see how many views certain videos starring yourself or your more outlandish colleague rack up. You can compare tactics on getting attention. And at least on the broadcast T.V. side of ESPN, attention is money. On social media, attention is followers and followers are attention from producers and attention from producers is money. I presume these folks and their agents can do the math.

Michael Pina @MichaelVPina

highlighted this possession in the story, but there aren't too many defenders in the league who can do stuff like this as consistently as smart does. it's a remarkable sequence: si.com/nba/2022/06/09…

June 9th 2022

23 Retweets154 Likes

I should note that there has never been a better time to be a fan of the actual basketball in terms of the analysis out there, including from ESPN. There’s a ton of great content being created about the basketball (honestly too much to link on a frequent basis). I just fret that if you don’t know where to find it, you’re getting fed some really absurd, meaningless nonsense a lot of the time on the four-letter...