Kerr: Green-Durant squabble not only drama team had to deal with
Big anniversary coming up. Got any plans?
Come Tuesday, Nov. 12, it will be one year since Draymond Green and Kevin Durant exposed the Warriors’ dirty linen for all of basketball to see.
Ancient history? No way. Their heated tiff is still being talked about. Green recently took responsibility for the altercation late in an overtime loss to the Clippers. A week after Green’s mea culpa, Durant confirmed that the unpleasantries that fateful night were a consideration when he decided to leave the Warriors for the Brooklyn Nets.
Golden State went to five consecutive NBA Finals, winning three, but no narrative of the dynastic Warriors is complete without the moment Camelot began to unravel. It’s partly our fault. We just can’t quit those Warriors.
Now a new podcast, “The Book of Basketball 2.0” by Bill Simmons, is pawing at the scab anew.
Simmons interviewed Warriors coach Steve Kerr for the podcast. Brian Witt of NBC Sports
Bay Area excerpted some of Kerr’s comments, and they are interesting, to say the least.
”This was two guys who were about ready to fight,” Kerr told Simmons. “I think I addressed it, but we didn’t. There was so much raw emotion in the locker room, we weren’t going to resolve anything that night, for sure.”
Kerr said he sensed the team “starting to drift a little bit” late in the 201718 season.
Like the Beatles during “Let it Be?”
“There was just sort of an unspoken tension that was there that Draymond couldn’t deal with,” Kerr said, “and he just snapped and it opened up a pretty big wound.”
Just Draymond being Draymond, said Kerr, who revealed — surprise! — that Green feeds off confrontation, and that confrontation sometimes has involved Kerr. A lot of the gritty interaction between Warriors players and the coaching staff played out behind closed doors. There was no hiding or mitigating the dust-up between Green and Durant.
“If this had happened at a practice, you can cover it up,” Kerr told Simmons. “Actually, we had several things over the past few years that have happened that never made it out, and we’re really proud of that.”
Do tell.