Draymond Green Finally Opens Up About Knocking Out His Teammate Last Year: ‘We Know Stuff That You Don’t Say Amongst Men’

 

Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green has finally begun to open up about why he knocked out former teammate Jordan Poole.

Last October, leaked practice footage showed Green and Poole jawing at one another before Poole pushed him away and Green landed a vicious punch in retaliation. Poole immediately dropped to the ground.

Although the team went through the season trying to convince everyone that everything was OK, chemistry on the court was noticeably different. The reigning NBA champions were eventually eliminated by the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference semifinals, and it wasn’t until the season’s exit interviews that head coach Steve Kerr admitted the incident compromised the team’s chemistry.

Speaking on the Patrick Beverley’s The Pat Bev Podcast, Green implied Poole said something that crossed a line.

“I don’t just hit people,” Green said. “I’ve been in this league 11 years … So dialogue happens and dialogue happens over the course of time. You usually ain’t just triggered by something that fast to that degree. This is a team. Ain’t nobody on my team triggering me in an instant.

“We know stuff that you don’t say amongst men. We know things that you have to stand on. As I’ve admitted before, I was wrong in the way I handled it for the situation where we were. But I’m a man at the end of the day. I stand on business.”

Beverley then explained how in the NBA, it’s common for the emotional leader of a team to not be the best player or highest scorer on the team. It’s often the roles players known for carrying themselves with a particular intensity, like Green, Beverley, and Philadelphia 76ers forward P.J. Tucker.

When a player crosses one of those leaders, Beverley added, it becomes much bigger than a dispute between players.

“You’re talking about a different type of guys that hold the heartbeat of the locker room,” he said. “So when you cross a line with them, it’s not you crossing a line with them. You’re disrespecting the team.”

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