In an act of contrition, Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green responded to former teammate and Washington Wizards star Jordan Poole‘s eyebrow-raising comment about his former team with a four-word message.
“I really am sorry,” Green replied to Andscape’s Marc Spears tweet of Poole’s “I love those guys over there. I love most of those guys over there” comment.
Green took Poole’s “most of the guys” clarification as a dig at him for punching his former teammate. This fractured their once close relationship and eventually led to Poole’s trade with the Wizards.
In December 2024, Green was remorseful about that October 2022 punching incident.
“I’ve always been a guy that no matter what, if someone’s younger than me, I always want to pour into them,” Green told Penny Hardaway on the “Two Cents Podcast.” “And I will say I kind of got thrust into a vet role before I was ready to handle it before I knew what it took to handle it. And I failed miserably.
“One of my biggest failures as a vet was what happened with Jordan Poole. It took me to go through that failure with Jordan Poole, who was someone who came in and chose his locker to be next to me because he wanted to learn from me. [He] was someone that I would spend time with and that I would pour into, and I [expletive] it all up.”
Draymond Green’s Doubts After Punching Incident
Before the Warriors signed Green to a four-year, $100 million extension in 2023, he doubted his return he revealed in an interview with ESPN’s Ohm Youngmisuk in September of that year.
“What gave me doubt is that I didn’t know if I would have the opportunity to redeem myself,” Green told Youngmisuk. “Not [because] that thing necessarily happened. It’s that, do you have an opportunity to make it right, or is that just it? It doesn’t change what happened. It doesn’t change that I was at fault. But I’m a human being, and human beings do wrong.”
“But how do you stand when it goes wrong, when things ain’t on your side? When everybody’s against you, when the world is saying, ‘Oh man, now all of a sudden you’re not worth the money you make.’ Or, ‘You’re the cancer and you’re the problem’ four championships later.”
The Warriors chose Green over Poole when they traded the latter to the Wizards for Chris Paul.
A ‘Nicer’ Draymond
Green and the Warriors have never recaptured their championship form since that incident. They were bounced in the second round of the playoffs in Poole’s final year in Golden State.
In the initial year after Poole’s unceremonious exit, Green did not change his ways. It appeared it emboldened him that the Warriors stuck with him.
Green torpedoed the Warriors’ next season with his involvement in two melees — chokeholding Timberwolves center Rudy Gobert and striking Suns center Jusuf Nurkic in the face — that led to a couple of lengthy suspensions. It hamstrung the Warriors, who failed to reach the postseason.
But the good that came out of it is it led to Green finally relenting to see a therapist, which he told Youngmisuk in a new ESPN profile on January 13, that it was one of the hardest things he’s ever done in his life.
“Starting therapy was [expletive] hard,” Green told Youngmisuk. “Because I’m from Saginaw, Michigan. I’m from an all-Black neighborhood that you don’t go to therapy or you’re f—ing weak. So you’re retraining a brain that’s been thinking a certain way for 30 years.
“The last thing you do growing up on the north side of Saginaw is [something that is perceived as] weak.”
While Green remains animated on the court, his former Michigan teammate Travis Walton told Youngmisuk that he’s shown great strides in keeping his emotions in check.
“He’s more intentional,” Walton told Youngmisuk. “He’s more softer with things. Maybe when he’s ready to erupt [in a training session], he’s like, ‘Let me look at it from a different perspective,’ [where] the old Draymond would’ve gone off. The old Draymond would’ve had a lot more to say than the Draymond right now.
“That’s a nicer Draymond.”
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