Draymond Green has not hesitated to call out fans and even analysts who he thought did not have the credentials to talk about basketball. He espouses the “new media” ideology that is supposed to praise players for doing well and evaluate bad performances based on critical analysis. For him, not everyone can talk about basketball just because they think they know about basketball.
Green has been insisting that most fans only turn on the TV and claim that they know how basketball should be played. The former NBA Defensive Player of the Year winner even once ripped “Undisputed” host Skip Bayless for committing the same mistake. The Golden State Warriors star hasn’t budged from that stance since becoming an analyst himself.
In the Draymond Green podcast, he doubled down on that conviction during a conversation with former NBA player and TNT analyst Jamal Crawford:
“I always tell football players, ‘I’m envious of you’ because they [fans] can only really watch and see, ‘Man, such and such ran for X amount of yards. He threw for this amount of yards. … How many passes did he complete?’
“There’s so much going on the football field that people actually shut the f**k up. They’re not going to talk and analyze the game of football how they try to do the game of basketball. Everybody and they mama think they know the game of basketball.”
Green was talking about the NFL when he referred to football. There are 22 players (11 on each side) on the field simultaneously for every snap. Basketball has five on each team and 10 combined for every possession.
Additionally, the length of the football field is 360 feet, which dwarfs basketball’s 94-feet floor. The most diehard football fans can’t catch every action on the grass. More often than not, they would only cheer for their team but refrain from analyzing the game.
For Draymond Green, basketball fans should not give comments like they are “gospel” truths. Great conversations can happen but unless that analyst has played professional basketball, the individual might as well limit his opinions, based on Green’s assertions.
Some of Draymond Green’s plays this season didn’t need a pro basketball player to evaluate
While it’s true that most plays on the basketball court need an in-depth analysis from someone who played pro basketball, some of them don’t. Draymond Green was guilty of a few incidents that don’t require a professional basketball player to judge and even criticize.
This season, Green is guilty of two of the most wildly violent actions. He once choked Minnesota Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert and followed it up by slapping Jusuf Nurkic of the Phoenix Suns. It was so bad that the NBA had to suspend him indefinitely until he met certain league and team conditions.
Even non-basketball fans were aghast with what Draymond Green did. They may know nothing about hoops but they were certain that what he did was far beyond the rules of basketball.
