Green’s rant won’t change things
Say this for Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors: The money has not softened his sharp edges.
As the 35th pick of the 2012 draft, Green famously memorized the names of the 34 players chosen ahead of him as a self-motivational mind trick, a way to ensure the chip on his shoulder was appropriately heavy as he proceeded to prove wrong a league’s worth of scouting staffs. Never mind that he has long proven to be a better player than all but a handful of those 34 — the likes of Anthony Davis and Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal the rare exceptions to his oddsdefying rise. Never mind that he is the only member of his draft class to win three championships. The crux of Green’s NBA origin story has always revolved around the perceived disrespect the league has misguidedly rained upon him.
Some guys would look at a career that began with a rookie-season salary of $850,000 (U.S.) and ballooned into more than $100 million in career earnings and see a fairy-tale story arc for which to be thankful. Green seems to see it as a base from which to occasionally rail against the next perceived injustice on his hit list.
The NBA ought to be thankful for his presence. A league run by lawyers surely recognizes Green’s undeniable gift for making an argument expansive enough to provide a day’s worth of content on multiple platforms.
For all that, it’s difficult to make a case that Green would have won over a jury with his most recent rant about the lot in life of certain NBA brethren. Green, if you missed the highly watchable press conference soliloquy, took aim at what he perceived as a built-in hypocrisy of pro sports. It’s not fair, he argued, that a pro athlete who asks to be traded gets pilloried in the court of public opinion — “castrated,” was the word Green used to describe James Harden’s alleged repercussion for asking out of Houston earlier this season — while franchises who announce their intention to move on from a player aren’t met with the same level of disdain.
Green was reacting to Monday’s news that the Cleveland Cavaliers, in their quest to remove from their midst the $28.8-million expiring contract of Andre Drummond, no longer intend to ask Drummond play for their team. The idea that Drummond was made to watch Monday’s Cavs-Warriors game from the sidelines in street clothes, to Green’s eye, was “bulls---.”
“As a player, you’re the worst person in the world when you want a different situation,” Green said. “But a team can say they’re trading you. And (Drummond) is to stay in shape, he’s to stay professional, and if not his career’s on the line. At some point this league has to protect the players from embarrassment like that.”
There will always be those who find it difficult to muster sympathy for a player like Drummond. Last season the rebuilding Pistons, unconvinced of Drummond’s viability as a franchise cornerstone, traded him to Cleveland for spare parts. Nine seasons into his NBA career he has yet to partake in his first career playoff victory. Which is one of many reasons why Drummond doesn’t make sense as a Toronto-bound trade target. While his stats can make him look elite — he’s a double-double factory worthy of Tim Hortons — his seeming lack of impact on the win-loss record suggests his game is the stuff of empty calories.
Still, Green has a point. Teams can announce their intention to trade players, either publicly or through leaks to friendly media messengers. But players who publicly voice their desire to be traded face punishment from the league, not to mention a daily scolding on social media. And make no mistake: The same teams that sell players on the virtue of loyalty, of sacrificing for the program, will trade the most loyal among them if it makes sense. Just ask DeMar DeRozan.
“At some point, we as players, we need to be treated with the same respect and have the same rights as the team would have,” Green said. “Everyone wants to say, ‘That young man can’t figure it out.’ But no one wants to say the organization can’t figure it out.”
That’s a fair point. The NBA system props up poorly run franchises with lottery picks and revenue sharing. Lessthan-model players aren’t always met with the same mercy. But let’s not overlook an important bit of reality that Green neglects: As much as the players talk about their partnership with the NBA’s owners, and as much as they have collectively bargained a 50-50 split on league revenues, the relationship between a team and a player still amounts to the relationship between an employer and an employee — albeit an employee with one of the all-time best compensation packages in the history of the known universe.
Employers can abuse that relationship, make no mistake. But the Cleveland Cavaliers, no one’s idea of a free-agent hot spot, are well aware of the need to be seen to “do right” by a 27-year-old former all-star like Drummond. It’s clearly Cleveland’s belief, in working with Drummond’s agent and being transparent about the effort to find Drummond another home, however futilely given the prohibitive nature of Drummond’s contract, that it was proceeding accordingly. In the age of load management, there are those who would see the decision not to play Drummond pending a potential trade as a benevolent act. Would Green have preferred the Cavaliers overuse Drummond in the pursuit of wins no matter the risk of injury?
And contrary to Green’s lawyerly sketch of the powerlessness of the NBA player, he’s hardly naive to the enormous power wielded by the league’s stars. Harden, castrated or not, demanded a trade with three full years remaining on the largest contract ever given to a Houston Rocket, this after the Rockets bowed to more than one of Harden’s demands for the acquisition and/or exit of various teammates.
Green’s not too hot on teams making it known they’re intent on trading a player. How does he feel about reports that Harden successfully pushed for the trading of more than one? Harden has since apologized for the way he exited Houston, a tacit admission that he “dogged it,” as even Green put it Monday. But so goes one of the imperfect realities of the franchise-player relationship — the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Being a model professional lessens the urgency for the organization to act.
The truism only holds, mind you, for players of a certain stature. MVP-calibre talents like Harden can expedite their exits with bad behaviour because there’s a market for their services. Highly paid but notso-obviously franchise-changing players like Drummond might have to sit and wait awhile. It’s not exactly a sob story guaranteed to tug heart strings in the court of public opinion.
But it’s hard not to respect Green for trying.