Draymond Green would have to be hospitalized every week if he returned to fight 20 years ago
Draymond Green wouldn’t have done this 20 or 30 years ago. Let’s be honest, he’s a good player who plays in a good team, but he wouldn’t have dared to act like that.
One of the most divisive, even hated characters in today’s league, Draymond Green has often been guilty of maligned breakdowns. An NBA legend also considered him lucky to evolve in a context that lends itself to it.
Revealed during the 2014-15 season, he appeared as a player that any team would like to have. A good defender, powerful and capable of covering all interior positions, Draymond Green was praised at the time for the valuable contribution he offered to his team. However, over the years, he gradually abandoned his Swiss army knife costume for the less glamorous one of a henchman.
Indeed, while his sporting contribution declined, the Warriors big man continued to be talked about for the wrong reasons. Increasingly sanguine, he regularly let his anger express himself on the floors, notably towards Rudy Gobert in a scene as violent as it was lunar. Repeated losses of composure which obviously caused a lot of reaction within the league.
Draymond Green lucky to play in the modern NBA?
Former All-Star who played for the Warriors at the end of his career, Kermit Washington had the opportunity to speak about the Draymond case. At the microphone of FOX Sports, he estimated that the latter would not have displayed the same attitude in a different era:
Draymond Green wouldn’t have done this 20 or 30 years ago. Let’s be honest, he’s a good player who plays in a good team, but he wouldn’t have dared to act like that.
I mean, there were so many tough guys back then. When you just look at Seattle, there was already Lonnie Shelton and Paul Silas. Elsewhere, you had guys like Truck Robinson, Clifford Ray… Every team had a hound. Draymond would have had no chance of beating anyone. Oh my God, no, definitely not!
NBA player between 1973 and 1988, Washington was apparently marked by the concentration of hotheads that could be observed at the time. Therefore, according to him, Green could not have been as wild as he is today in his time. This would indeed have caused him serious physical consequences, but would also have weighed down his bank account according to the former winger:
He would have ended up in the hospital every week if he had played then. But I think he would have been smart enough to realize that the context was different. Nowadays, players are making millions of dollars. That wasn’t the case at the time, so the guys didn’t want to get suspended and risk losing $200,000 or $300,000 because of that.
For Kermit Washington, Draymond Green has enough to be satisfied with evolving in the contemporary NBA. Because if he had been born 30 years earlier, his bloodshed would not have gone unpunished on the field and would have greatly damaged his fortune.
