The Warriors and Draymond Green need each other now more than ever

Draymond Green preview/review: can his body hold up?

As the new season approaches for the Golden State Warriors, it’s time to dust myself off and turn towards some long overdue season reviews. So long overdue in fact, that it makes sense to just roll the project into a season preview as well. A bridge to the future, as they say!

Draymond Green is an interesting case when it comes to a value assessment. More complicated than the tax code, Green’s combination of elite defense and anemic on-ball scoring have led to a legacy discussion that is just as argumentative as he is. At this point in his career, the year-to-year valuation is becoming less important against the backdrop of his role in the Warriors’ biggest moments. As long as Green can continue to come through on the biggest stages, there’s a whole lot of wriggle room in regards to points per game - or whatever the gripe du jour is on Twitter on any given day.

With a total salary of $25.8 million this season, and a player option for $27.6 million next year, scrutiny of the Warriors’ mercurial star is as intense as ever.

The bad news first

There’s a reason that Draymond Green’s reputation is often on the defensive. When it comes to the all-important “points per game” category, his paltry contributions are often highly visible - especially when going gets tough. After getting knocked out of the play-in tournament in the previous season off a Green missed floater, there were some aspects that improved but the core issues remained present last season. And that missed floater is a sequence that will live in the collective consciousness - if you could have a visual for the primary underlying concerns, this would probably be it:

CJ Fogler AKA Perc70 #BlackLivesMatter @cjzero

"It's Draymond Green time" - Draymond Green

Now, to be fair, there are ample areas where Green’s offensive acumen shines. He’s elite at setting screens, and serving as the primary distributor within coach Steve Kerr’s movement-based offense. But looking at the on/off split from Cleaning the Glass (which removes garbage time) we can see how uneven Green’s impact has been in this regard. Does he make the offense better? Well, it depends:

Some context is helpful here. As with any on/off split, the values are showing team impact - so much of the effects above are about what’s happening when Green isn’t on the court. And even when Green is playing, this window into his impact is extremely limited.

So why show it?

The biggest issue that I see cited online in regards to Green’s offense is his lack of scoring punch - and it’s a fair criticism. In relation to other players at his position, Green has spent the bulk of his career at a below-average scoring efficiency. Looking at the previous five seasons in particular, Green’s relative jump last season was much needed; but still only sends him up to slightly below average.

In around 28.9 minutes per game last season, Green averaged 7.5 points (on 52.5% from the field and 29.6% shooting from deep).

In the end though, I don’t find myself especially swayed by any of those criticisms. Green has been who he has been for years, and it mostly works. Scoring 14 points instead of seven per game would be nice, but that’s not the real “make or break” issue when it comes to Draymond Green.

It’s health.

Green, an undersized yet overperforming center, has long been one of Kerr’s favorite not-so-secret weapons. For the same reasons that Voltron doesn’t just go full mega mode all the time, the Warriors keep Green away from full-time center duties until needed. The emergence of Kevon Looney has helped in this regard - and the Warriors are baking (once again) on young James Wiseman being available to help cover the center position.

Green hasn’t played every game in a season since 2013, and was limited to just 46 games during the regular season last year. As his age and health concerns continue to grow, concerns about durability and availability will only increase as the years move on. This will factor into his next contract, but the more immediate concern is how chronic the back issue is.

There’s no doubt that when healthy, Green is still elite when healthy:

Through the Warriors' first 37 games, they were 28-9. Green appeared in 33 of those games and averaged 8.1 points, 7.8 rebounds, 7.6 assists, 1.4 steals and 1.2 blocks per game. There was no better or more impactful defender in the game. 

But then he succumbed to a painful back issue that kept him out from late December through the middle of March - and when he came back, it was a different Draymond. A hampered one; from that same article linked above:

In the 12 regular-season games (10 starts) that Green played after recovering from his injury, he averaged 6.5 points, 6.6 rebounds, 5.8 assists, 1.2 steals and 0.8 blocks per game. His plus-minus was an average of minus-0.4. Before the injury, his plus-minus was an average of plus-5.9. 

The Warriors had a defensive rating of 104.2 with Green on the court last season. But without him, that number ballooned to 112.0. His 103 defensive rating per 100 possessions was his best since winning the DPOY in 2016-17, and Green's 4.6 defensive box plus-minus was a career-high. 

The article goes on to point out that Green fouled out of five playoff games, and was benched during game four of the NBA Finals - a performance that even had his mother questioning what she was watching.

The injury was fairly serious, limiting Green’s ability to run and jump: "My L5 and S1 disks is herniated, so it's bulging out and it's hitting my sciatica nerve." Hopefully that issue is all healed up now, but keep an eye on Green’s health this season.

It’s this uncertainty that is (for me) the “bad news” coming into this season. Which version of Green will we get? And how often? The answer seems more uncertain now than ever before.

Good news

Now that all of that hand wringing is out of the way, let’s spend some energy languishing in the good side of Draymond Green. Green remains one of the Warriors’ most trusted and valuable pieces and any hope of a repeat will rest heavily on frequent appearances of the good version. Thankfully, there’s an abundant book of records on how Green helps this team.

Taking advantages away is the core value of Green’s defense, and he excels at it. One of the few players in the history of the league that truly can cover positions 1-5, Green’s incredible defensive acumen is going to play a large role in getting him into the Hall of Fame, eventually. Defensive metrics are far from perfect, but Green set career highs in three different ones this season (Darko, BPM, EPM); so any potential physical decline seems to be getting mitigated as Green’s skills and understanding of the game continue to develop.

For now, it’s just worth noting that he is inarguably one of the very best defenders in the league. The chart below shows his value in preventing ball handlers from gaining an advantage (that’s him, way up on the top left).

SIS Hoops @SIS_Hoops

Two important avenues to player impact are advantage creation on offense and prevention on defense. Here are where players stacked up last season in these two on-ball measures:

Secondly, even within the context of his low scoring numbers, Green continues to bolster a Warriors offense that is reliant on willing passers making astute plays. As much as the internet loves to mock Green’s jump shot form, or his shortcomings as a scorer, it’s easy to see how critical the “offenseless” Green is to what the Warriors do.

As trite as it sounds, this really does go beyond on/off splits and box score stats. The Golden State Warriors simply do not have the same championship DNA without Green. It’s not exactly quantifiable, but I think that’s why the word “intangibles” is even in the basketball lexicon. If we are looking for an honest valuation of what Green does and does not bring to the table, it’s mandatory to point out all the times (and all the different ways) that Draymond Green impacts a game. While it’s important to talk about the broader context, a whole lot of that discussion evaporates into background noise against the loud, dynamic basketball guitar solos that this man routinely unleashes against the highest levels of competition.

Justin (RIPKOBE) @ThePackageJG

Draymond Green: Hard drive in adv situation, makes the correct pass that leads to a good shot for Klay, gets OReb, hard drive in adv situation, makes the correct pass, layup. Very few players have better recognition and awareness in chaos

And the Golden State organization gets this. Long after Sherwood-Strauss wrote an article predicting that Green’s personality would shatter the Warriors’ dynasty, Green remains a critical cog in the machine that has been running roughshod over the NBA for nearly a decade.

Here’s Bob Myers on potentially offloading Green:

“No, no, I would definitely, unequivocally say (he’s) not a guy we look at and say he’s not going to be around,” Myers shared. “Now, at some point, decisions are going to have to be made. But as far as his importance to this organization and what he’s done, we’re going to do everything we can to keep him in the fold.”

So Green isn’t going anywhere - not soon. And that’s fantastic news for a Golden State Warriors team that could really use his help as they try to repeat as champions yet again.