Golden State's Draymond Green problem

When Walton took over for the first three months of the season, with Kerr sidelined due to complications from back surgery, he had assumed a light grip on the steering wheel. He was, for example, still rebounding for Green, just as he'd done as an assistant. Though the team had something of a power vacuum in Kerr's absence, Walton thought it best if he maintained his old duties, carrying on as though nothing were amiss.

The early results were historically good. The Warriors were dominating the league, dominating SportsCenter, Curry's incandescent start prompting teams to double-team him, allowing Green to make more plays than ever. Sixteen games into the season, Green had gone from averaging 3.7 assists a game the season before to 6.6, and a man who had tallied just two triple-doubles in his first three seasons was now a nightly triple-double threat. And nobody, apparently, was more aware of it than Green, who would end the regular season with 13 triple-doubles, the NBA's single-season record for power forwards. Suddenly far more than a "glue guy," Green was a star, flourishing without restrictions. But such conditions and such outcomes? They make it hard to tell a man anything.

IT'S JAN. 17, the day after the Warriors' first blowout loss of the season, a 113-95 drubbing by the Pistons. The team is holding practice in a snow-covered Michigan high school, at a remove from the camera flashes and screaming fans that await at nearly every practice in an arena. Walton begins his walk from the court to the assembled reporters in the corner of the gym. On practice days, it's traditional for the coach to kick off media interviews. But when Walton is within a few feet of the cameras, Green interjects, with a grin: "Luke! So we lose a game and you stop f---ing rebounding for me?!?"

The statement is said with no evident malice, but it halts Walton in his tracks. He shoots the media gaggle a glance, then turns, runs right over and starts shagging balls for his player.

IN RETROSPECT, IT'S hard to argue with any approach that leads to a record-setting regular season. Walton's strategy of Green indulgence coincided with the most successful run a rookie coach had ever seen, a 39 -- 4 start that did much to net Walton a head-coaching gig with the Lakers.

For Golden State's coaching staff, there was also realpolitik to handling Kerr's absence. Concessions had to be made, given Green's force of personality. On Dec. 11, in Boston, the Warriors had endured a high-intensity double overtime for the final victory of their historic 24-game winning streak to open the season. It was the first of a back-to-back, at the end of a brutal seven-game, two-week road trip out East. They were banged up, weary from the winning streak's onslaught of attention and pressure.

After the Boston win, Golden State's coaches had met to assess the situation. Together, they had decided to rest starters the next night in Milwaukee. But that plan was dashed after they walked in on the end of an impassioned speech by Green to teammates about the once-in-a-lifetime chance they had to chase the all-time record for wins. This team is on the edge of history! Green was yelling. These moments only come along so often! This was not uncommon. Throughout the season, Green, in the guise of motivation, would berate his co-workers during games and practices; on multiple occasions he had to be separated from teammates.

"Draymond f---ed up practice and s---," then-Warriors center Marreese Speights says. "Draymond's a good guy, but I think at the end of the day, it hurt the whole chemistry of the year." One player in particular, he says, took much of the heat: "Draymond and Klay got into it a lot." (Thompson declined to comment for this story.)

A code of conduct exists within the NBA. Some yelling is expected, but vets do not accept frequent Bobby Knight -- style haranguings from younger players. Or, as Speights puts it, "Guys don't respect you if you yell at them in front of all these fans. We're not trying to lose the game. F -- ."

And so it was that an hour before a win over the Lakers on Nov. 24, almost two months prior to his return to the sideline, Kerr visited with the team to deliver a speech on his four core values: joy, mindfulness, competition and compassion. According to team sources, the emphasis on compassion was meant as a message to Green.

IT'S JAN. 30 in Philadelphia, and Kerr is patrolling the sideline. One week earlier, Kerr had finally returned -- far from cured, still fighting chronic pain. Partly hastening his return, according to team sources: The Warriors had grown unruly after three months under Walton. Someone needed to take back control.

Green, with 10 points, 10 boards and 6 assists at the end of the second quarter, has another triple-double in his sights. But at halftime, with the Warriors up 19, Kerr informs Green that if he's angling for a triple-double tonight, against the consensus worst team in the NBA, it will have to come by the third quarter. No more of this playing-in-garbage-time-for-stats nonsense. That edict will lead to an unintended consequence.

On the first play of the second half, Green gets the ball with an open lane to the rim but stops short in favor of setting a ball screen and trying to lead a cutting Klay Thompson with a pass. Turnover. Green begins spraying passes all over the court on his way to seven turnovers. A 19-point fourth-quarter lead dissolves to nothing. On the game's second-to-last play, with the score tied, the Warriors avert disaster only when Green finds Barnes in the corner for a 3 with 0.2 of a second remaining. It's Green's ninth assist.

Green will confess after the game to his role in what went wrong: "We started turning the ball over due to my selfish unselfishness, and it was all downhill from there." When asked later about Green's comments, Kerr will commend his honesty. But though the Warriors continue to win -- 20 victories in their first 22 games following Kerr's return -- something has changed. Green goes into a shooting slump, or perhaps a shooting shrink. Under Walton, he had attempted 3.6 3s per game, making 41.4 percent of them. After Kerr's return, he's averaged 0.6 3-point attempts and made 28.6 percent.

Kerr is back. Green is diminished. And the correlation cannot be ignored.

IT'S FEB. 27 in Oklahoma City, during halftime of a nationally televised game, and Green is losing his holy mind. Inside the visitors locker room, he's hollering "I am not a robot!" at Kerr. When Kerr tells him to sit down, Green screams, "Motherf---er, come sit me down!" When he goes after Kerr, his teammates, including Curry and Thompson, step in to stave off disaster.

Minutes later, in her report following halftime, ESPN sideline reporter Lisa Salters will recite a portion of Green's explosion: "I am not a robot! I know I can play! You have me messed up right now! If you don't want me to shoot, I won't shoot the rest of the game!"

"I'm standing outside the locker room with the Oklahoma City police, which are always stationed outside of every locker room," Salters will later recall. "They kind of moved me aside, and the officer just kind of stood by the door, with his hand on his weapon like he was trying to determine what he should do. It was clear that something bad was about to happen in this locker room. We've never heard anything like this before."

Salters, with all of 50 seconds available for her report, had, in truth, conveyed only a fraction of the situation -- one so unnerving that at least one arena security official moved outside the locker room door in a SWAT-team pose. Throughout the night, Salters would be assailed by fans on Twitter, arguing that she should not have reported what had happened in the locker room. But this was not a private moment unscrupulously divulged to the public; it was a private moment so forceful it breached the walls of its sanctum. "This was something extraordinary that was happening," Salters says.

Publicly, the Warriors downplay the incident. At the next practice, Kerr says, "It's the NBA. Every team I've ever been on has had stuff like this. Every team. Championship teams or not, it happens. It's 15 alpha males in a room trying to compete, money on the line and prestige and trophies and competition. This is being so overblown."

Privately, according to sources close to the team, Green's teammates respond by voting to fine him. (When asked a week later about the fine, a livid Green would insist, "I asked to be fined. You can report that!") Green also does not take kindly to the coverage of his outburst, which leads to the Warriors brokering a sit-down between him and Salters. Salters recalls telling him, "What kind of bothered me about it was hearing the pain that was in your voice -- you weren't just mad, you were in pain, emotional pain."

Kerr maintains that what happened, while unusual, was not unique. "If it didn't happen, it would be kind of weird," he says. "It would be like nobody is revealing anything to each other. You have to let stuff out as a team. Rage means that's happening."

Then Kerr pauses and, as if acknowledging something that can't be swept aside, offers: "You have to find the edge, you find the balance. About two years ago, [Draymond] was good. This last year, a couple of times he went over the brink. That's the challenge."

INSOFAR AS THERE can be unanimity regarding the unknown, the Warriors believe this: The 2016 title would have been theirs if not for Green's Game 5 suspension, the penalty he earned in the waning moments of Game 4 by swiping at LeBron's genitals after James guided his undercarriage over the back of Green's skull. Few things capture the beautiful absurdity of sports quite like this moment deciding a championship, a moment Speights frames as, "If somebody put they balls on your head, what are you supposed to do?"

In response, the Warriors had united around Green, with the two most powerful team executives rising in defense of their guy. Owner Joe Lacob, who due to his brashness is often internally referred to as the Draymond of his operation, sported a Green jersey at Game 5. Meanwhile, Warriors GM Bob Myers watched the proceedings alongside Green in a suite at the O.co Coliseum. After that Game 5 loss, and the collapse in Games 6 and 7, when Green had apologized to his teammates in his final news conference, Kerr had insisted that Green had nothing to apologize for: "Without you, we're not even here."

But herein lies the problem the Warriors have to solve. By so often defending Green publicly, the franchise might also be sending him the message that he doesn't need to confront the central tension of his career: that what makes him great on the court -- the passion and drive, the recklessness and ego -- threatens to undermine him off it.

Consider how he responded at Team USA minicamp when he was asked about the East Lansing incident, in which Green reportedly slapped a man who'd been heckling him in a bar, and in which Green wasn't allowed to leave jail, according to the police report, "until completely sober." Did he need to adjust his behavior? With a grin, Green replied, "Being me has gotten me this far." Two weeks later, he shared his genitals with the world.

There is, in truth, a note of resignation in how team officials discuss Green these days. More than one expressed that what transpired in East Lansing is indivisible from what makes Green such a maddeningly effective on-court opponent. More than one expressed that this would be a permanent issue.

Myers, for his part, says he's the wrong person to ask. "I have some blind spots for Draymond," he says. "I know that's probably not the right answer. Yeah, he could do some things differently. He'd be the first to acknowledge that. He had a lot come to him, maybe unexpectedly, as far as fame and things like that. But if caring too much is your problem? Or living too much? Well, you can fix those things, I hope. Trying to get someone to care or have emotion? That's harder to do."

Two years ago, Green escaped the realm of role player by dint of talent but also pride. Pride is what fueled a rise far beyond modest expectations. The issue is what pride becomes once massively validated. To hear many around the Warriors tell it, it's turned into an ego on overdrive and metastasized into something that imperils the team's stability well beyond the 2016 Finals.

All of which leaves Kerr in a suboptimal situation. As much as he might want Green to stop making the wrong kind of news, he's wary of sabotaging Green's id, the part of him he most needs as the coach of a team that won 73 games last season. "The dangerous thing is," Kerr says, "if you try to temper him too much, are you taking away his edge?" And should Kerr attempt to counter Green's excesses, there's seemingly little organizational support. "He's on an island," one Warriors official says of Kerr.

Indeed, ask most team officials about how Green approaches life off the court and they routinely answer with a go-to phrase that's one part scouting report, one part absolution: "He gets after it." Despite the arrest (for which he ultimately reached a plea deal), despite the penis pic, despite Green's Snapchat of a 118 mph drive toward Oakland's heavily trafficked Caldecott Tunnel, how much, they note, can teams credibly focus on off-hours behavior in a league that has routinely seen players who "get after it" bring more energy than their opponents?

There is, to be sure, a "boys will be boys" ethos in the NBA that condones a high level of hedonism, as long as the player produces. Still, the chorus of murmurs around Green is growing -- not because his production is suffering but because his discretion is. As one Warriors official says, "There's an a--hole in every bar. The question is, why are you winding up in that situation?" And as one NBA team executive says of Green's behavior, and its potential to subvert a potential dynasty, "He's what will ultimately prevent them from having long-term success."

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THREE YEARS AGO, the Warriors had a mystery on their hands. Team trainers were noticing that the stationary bikes in their practice facility had become rather unstationary. More to the point, they were disappearing. Eventually, the mystery was solved. Green was dragging the stationary cycles to the sauna and leaving them there to soak.

It turned out that Green, who's struggled with his weight since his days at Michigan State, had developed a theory: By riding the bikes in the sauna, he could more efficiently shed pounds. In the short term, biking in a sauna will do that, but much of what is lost is water weight and is soon gained back. Golden State trainers were aware that Green's regimen was, at best, scientifically dubious. Also, the bikes were getting ruined. Says a former Golden State trainer: "He would come in and say, 'The screen's not working on the bike.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, I wonder why.'"

Still, the team chose to ultimately allow it. It did involve cardio. And Green was loath to give it up. At the end of the day, success trusts its routine, no matter how absurd, grueling or dangerous to electronic equipment it might be.

And so it goes with the Warriors and their enigmatic star. The team indulges his more questionable behavior -- the late-night mischief, the berating of teammates, the feuding with coaches, the waterboarding of bikes -- because in doing so it has enabled him to become perhaps the best two-way player in the league. On the other hand, it might also have cost them a championship.

The Warriors have a problem to solve. The success of Draymond Green is inextricably wrapped up in the enigma of Draymond Green. There is, after all, more than one way to enable a man.