There’s no comparison
CLEVELAND — Draymond Green does not care for your comparisons.
He does not care that Magic Johnson said his Showtime Lakers would sweep today’s Warriors answering that question with an amplified laugh followed by “That’s my thoughts.”
Green, because he is a competitor did say today’s Warriors would run the Showtime Lakers into the ground with their speed perhaps but he knows he can’t prove that any more than Magic can prove his Lakers would wipe the floor with Green’s Warriors.
“I sound stupid, right?” Green asked. “No, I think I sound stupid because that’s how all of it be sounding to me. It is what it is.”
Green and the Warriors are here for one reason. Win a title. Period. End of sentence.
All the rest is just opinion and fodder for water cooler talk.
Green believes its downright silly to even bother trying to compare one generations dominant team with another.
“First off, the game is completely different than it was back then,” Green said. “Nowadays, if you can’t shoot a three, you’re a liability on the floor. That wasn’t the case back then. So I never understand when people try to compare eras and say, oh, this team could have beat this team or they couldn’t have beat that team or this player is better than that player. It doesn’t make sense to me because you’re kind of talking two different games, for real. So I never really understand that, nor do I get off into it. They were great in their time, we’re great in our time and respect that.”
He says it’s equally a waste of his time to debate best player on the planet today or anything of that sort. That came out after he was asked if teammates Kevin Durant is nipping at the heels of LeBron James as best player in the game today.
“Number one, I think it’s all someone’s opinion of who they think is the best player on the planet,” Green said. “LeBron is a great player. But K is great. I think KD is like a ‘create a player,’ if you go and create this player, and you can do everything you want to do, you’re going to probably create Kevin Durant. And so he’s special. But both of those guys are special.”
But Green is adamant neither player cares enough to even have this debate.
“I don’t think either one of them is out here playing in this Finals for the title of the best player in the world,” he said. “They’re playing for a title. An NBA title. So I don’t think ... I think that’s the last thing on both of their minds is who is going to say who is better. Because at the end of the day it don’t matter. If you don’t win, and someone say, oh, man, he’s the best player in the world, I mean, what do you get from that?”
What Green knows and what he will offer up an opinion on is his own teams’ mind set being up 2-0 on the Cavs and looking to close out this series on the road in four straight.
“You just see a certain amount of focus,” Green said of this year’s Warriors. “You see a competitive, a competitive level of where like it hasn’t been matched. That’s a good sign. But just the way guys have been locked in, focused on the task at hand, I mean it’s been a special thing. And yet, in saying that, I think we can be so much better. I think that the first game we executed great and we had four turnovers, but we didn’t really make shots.
“The second game we didn’t execute very well, but we made shots,” he continued. “So now we need to put those two things together. But the one thing that’s been constant is we have competed. We have been locked in on the defensive end. If we continue to do that, we’ll always give ourselves a chance to win.”
Green though had one more potentially historic debate to debunk and that was how satisfying a 16-0 run through the playoffs, something they are two consecutive wins from accomplishing and something no team in the history of the game has ever done, would be.
“Everyone wants to make history but I just want to win four games,” Green said. “If that’s 4-3, it’s 4-3. If that’s 4-0, great. But I just win to win four games. Championships are history. That’s really the only history I want to make.”
The road to that history continues Wednesday when Game 3 tips off at 9 p.m.