GREEN WANTS A RING, NOT A DEBATE
Some argue about history — Warriors go out and make it
Draymond Green does not care for your comparisons.
He does not care that Magic Johnson said his Showtime Lakers would sweep today’s Golden State Warriors — answering a question about the matter with an amplified laugh, followed by: “That’s my thoughts.”
Because he is a competitor, Green did say today’s Warriors might run the Showtime Lakers into the ground with their speed, 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: to win an NBA title, period. All the rest is just opinion and fodder for water-cooler talk.
Green said it’s downright silly to bother trying to compare one generation’s 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 said it’s equally a waste of his time to debate who is the best player on the planet or anything of that sort. That came out after he was asked if teammate 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 K.D. is like a create-aplayer, 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 … I think that’s the last thing on both of their minds because at the end of the day, it don’t matter. If you don’t win and someone says, oh, man, he’s the best player in the world — I mean, what do you get from that?”
Green will offer an opinion on his own team being up 2-0 on the Cleveland Cavaliers 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 level … 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 added. “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 had one more potentially historic debate to debunk. That’s about a 16-0 run through the playoffs, something the Warriors are two wins away from, something no team in the history of the game has done.
“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. Championships are history. That’s really the only history I want to make.”
The Warriors will play Game 3 in Cleveland on Wednesday.
At the end of the day, it don’t matter. If you don’t win and someone says, oh, man, he’s the best player in the world — I mean, what do you get from that?