Green’s energy powered Game 2 win
Warriors’ forward thrives but treads the line with his outbursts, fouls
Draymond Green drew a technical foul after trading words with Boston’s Grant Williams … and nearly earned another technical when he got into a skirmish with Jaylen Brown … and constantly yapped at the officials, because that’s like oxygen to him … and had an animated exchange with Steve Kerr.
Put another way, Green was engaged — extraordinarily engaged, even by his standards — in Game 2 of the NBA Finals.
This meant good things for the Golden State Warriors, as it usually does. Green’s tenacity sparked a spirited defensive effort, especially in the third quarter, and the Warriors roared away for a 107-88 victory on Sunday at Chase Center.
He understood the danger of lugging a 2-0 deficit to Boston ahead of Game 3 on Wednesday night. He knew the quickest way for the Warriors to regain their mojo was to crank up their defense, to make Brown and Jayson Tatum work for their points, to make Al Horford and Marcus Smart disappear from the 3-point arc.
That’s how the Warriors held the Celtics to 32 fewer points than they scored in Game 1. Boston shot 38% from the field Sunday, after shooting 51% in the series opener, mostly because its shooters found Golden State defenders up in their grill, time after unnerving time.
And that traces to Green arriving with fresh vigor, frustrated by his team’s fourthquarter collapse three nights earlier. After seeing all this, Stephen Curry was asked when he knew the Warriors would get the “extra amped” version of Draymond on Sunday.
“About five minutes after Game 1,” Curry said with a thin smile. “That’s all I needed to see and hear from him, in terms of he knew what he needed to do.”
This illuminates a central reason for the Warriors’ wild success the past eight years with Curry, Green and Klay Thompson. They bring distinctly different strengths and temperaments, from Curry’s offensive wizardry to Thompson’s two-way brilliance (at least pre-injuries) to Green’s defensive ferocity.
Just as Curry sets the tone on offense, Green does the same on defense.
So the Game 1 pratfall, allowing the Celtics to score 40 points in the fourth quarter, stung Green. That reflects on
ANALYSIS
him, fairly or not, and he absolutely wasn’t going to let it happen again in Game 2.
As he put it Saturday after practice, the Celtics didn’t always “feel” the Warriors defensively in the opener — and that’s not acceptable to the 2016-17 Defensive Player of the Year.
“I have to send a message,” Green said. “Guys follow me on that side of the ball. If I’m not sending a message, then who’s sending it?”
Or, as Gary Payton II said of Green, “He lit the fire under us, as he did all season. He lights it and everybody else follows.”
Green downplayed the significance of a switch in strategy — he spent most of Sunday’s game on Brown, after covering Horford throughout the opener. But that mattered. Green often wandered away from Horford in Game 1, to help his teammates in the lane, and that left Horford free to cause problems on the perimeter (26 points).
This time, Green focused largely on Brown — who scored nine points early and had only eight more the rest of the game.
Their matchup included a dangerous dust-up late in the second quarter. Green fouled Brown on a 3-point shot, and the two players became tangled as they hit the floor. Green’s feet ended up near Brown’s head.
Brown understandably was unhappy about this, and he responded by pushing away Green’s feet, standing up and staring down at Green (who also gave Brown a slight push in the back while on the floor). Green grabbed at Brown’s shorts on his way up.
In normal circumstances, the officials probably call a double technical on the play. In this circumstance, maybe because another T would have meant a Green ejection, referee Zach Zarba stuck with his foul call on Green and added no technicals.
“I feel like they could have called it, but they let it go in terms of a technical either way,” Brown said. “But I don’t know what I was supposed to do there. Somebody’s got their legs on the top of your head and then he tried to pull my pants down.
“That’s what Draymond does. He’ll do whatever it takes to win: He’ll pull you, grab you, try to muck up the game. … He raised his physicality to try to stop us, and now we’ve got to raise ours.”
Green’s ploy worked, because the Warriors raised their physicality to another level in the third quarter. (Payton’s return Sunday from a fractured elbow also helped.) Their swarming defense flustered the Celtics and busted the game open with a 35-14 quarter.
Consider some other notable numbers: The Warriors forced Boston into 18 turnovers, five more than its season average. Horford, after making six 3pointers in Game 1, didn’t take a shot beyond the arc in Game 2. Smart, who made four longdistance shots in the opener, went 0-for-3 Sunday.
It’s almost as if the Warriors suddenly remembered they had the NBA’s second-ranked defense this season. They need to bottle that thought for Games 3 and 4 in Boston, where they must win at least once to earn the championship.
“I thought everybody was more engaged,” head coach Steve Kerr said of his team’s Game 2 defensive effort. “We knew we had to come with a much better sense of aggression, and Draymond played a huge role in that.”