Draymond Green is the heart of Golden State Warriors

draymond-green
Copyrights: News.com.au

Draymond Green is the type of player that you want in your team. He hustles he gives his everything he has in order to give his team a better chance of winning the game, and most importantly he offers the Golden State what they need the most, a reliable defender that can guard 5 positions with great success. He has won three NBA titles with the Warriors and has been an all-star three times, while in 2017 he managed to win the Defensive Player of the Year award. He was the original part of the trio of the Curry-Thompson-Green that won an NBA title in the 2014-15 season and managed to have an incredible regular season with 73 wins and only 9 losses. If it weren’t for the miraculous comeback from the Cleveland Cavaliers, they would have won another title. In my opinion, they would have managed to win the next two titles with this team, without any additions. However, Kevin Durant chose the easy way out and joined the Warriors to win a title, something that he couldn’t do with Thunder many years now.
It turns out that Kevin Durant made a good choice for himself and managed to win the title for two years in a row. Kevin Durant will surely be among the best players to have ever played this game and you can put Stephen Curry on that list as well, but this wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible contributions of Draymond Green on both ends of the floor. Defensively he will be able to guard the 7 footers and the point guards and he has impeccable positioning defensively while getting steals left and right. In the 2016-17 season, he was averaging 2 steals per game. When we get back to his offensive contributions, he gives the reigning champs exactly what they need, a player who knows where he has to be and what to do. His point per game average isn’t that high, he has a career average of 9.3 points per game, but he knows how to space the floor and find the open guy that can shoot an easy three. In his past 3 seasons, he averaged more than 7 assists per game, and we can’t forget also his rebounding, he has been averaging 8.3 rebounds per game in the past 4 seasons, in other words, he makes everything easier for Curry, Durant, and Thompson. While he may not be a direct threat to score he will make sure that the right man has the ball at the right time.
This brings us to a very important point, the altercation that happened between him and Kevin Durant. It started when Draymond Green got the rebound with only 5 seconds left on the clock and the score was tied 106 – 106, instead of giving the ball to Kevin Durant he dribbled the ball and had it stolen on the last second of the regulation time. Warriors ended up losing the game and apparently, Kevin Durang was heated and the infamous altercation happened where Draymond Green has apparently told Kevin Durant that they don’t need him and that they have won even before he joined the team. This has caused a lot of headaches to the franchise and they suspended Green for one game and this has raised many questions since things got even worse for the Dubs, they were losing many games that they would normally not lose.
Winning has the effect of squashing beef among players, if Warriors win another NBA title this year, the Dubs dynasty will continue to reign over the rest of the league. However, if they lose this year, many changes can be expected to happen. Kevin Durant is on the last year of his contract and he has stated before that he won’t be taking any pay cuts in order to keep the team together and if you add that to the fact that Draymond Green has another year on his contract, things can get very messy for the Warriors.
Kevin Durant may force the organization to choose between him and Green, meaning that he would sign a new contract with the Warriors only if they trade Draymond Green, or it could be vice versa, Draymond Green would force the front office to choose between him and Durant. While this may not be the end of the Warriors dynasty even if one of them leaves the squad, they would definitely lose a very important piece of their team.

Copyrights: sportskeeda.com
When it comes to the million-dollar question of choosing between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green, I know that many people would choose Kevin Durant without even thinking for longer than a fraction of a second. However, I wouldn’t choose him over Draymond Green, this may sound crazy to so many people, but what Green offers, no one else in the squad can offer, but what Kevin Durant offers, Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson can offer. After all, Draymond Green was right, they won without Durant and they still can win without him, with a solid bench and some good role players, they don’t need him.
This may never come to happen since Warriors are back to their winning ways, at the moment they stand 1st on the Western Conference with 18 wins and 9 losses and are on a three-game winning streak. As I said earlier, winning tends to eliminate the inner problems of a team, but we may have to watch from up close to see how this drama will unfold.