Can Draymond Green Find Peace?
The NBA’s most combustible competitor is trying to maintain his fire while avoiding another explosion. And like another volatile NBA champion before him, he’s putting in the work. “The reality is we all got trauma,” says Green.Can Draymond Green Find Peace?
The NBA’s most combustible competitor is trying to maintain his fire while avoiding another explosion. And like another volatile NBA champion before him, he’s putting in the work. “The reality is we all got trauma,” says Green.
If you followed the NBA in the mid-2000s, the mere mention of “Ron Artest” would likely evoke a very specific array of images—of anger and volatility, frustration and violence, a player out of control. A menace, even.
If your NBA fandom instead commenced in the early 2010s, the mere mention of the name “Metta World Peace” would conjure a much different portrait—of quiet intensity and steadiness, enthusiasm and warmth, a player who, true to his chosen surname, had found serenity. A role model, even.
The first player ignited the most violent player-fan brawl in NBA history, drawing an 86-game suspension and the label of being a “thug.” The second player became one of Kobe Bryant’s most beloved teammates, a fan favorite, a mental health advocate, and, ultimately, an NBA champion—a moment he celebrated by thanking his therapist on live TV as confetti fluttered around him.
A fan who tuned out after 2005 might hardly recognize the beloved bruiser with the unique name on the back of his Lakers jersey. A young fan in 2010 who’d never heard of the “Malice at the Palace” would be shocked to see the unbridled rage from the familiar-looking figure in a Pacers uniform.
They are, of course, the same individual, Artest and World Peace, though not exactly the same person. Even before he officially changed his name for the first time in 2011, Artest had begun a journey of self-reflection, self-understanding, and self-forgiveness; an evolution. He learned to harness the aggression that made him a star. He learned to walk the line, instead of obliterating it.
“Basketball was essentially at the center of my life,” World Peace says now. “But as I was becoming complete, I started to learn about myself: Why am I so emotional? Because you got that emotion on the court, then you got that philanthropic side off the court. So you got two sides of a player, and I wanted to bring it together. How do you (control) that passion or that emotion that you’re bringing to the court? Why do you let it spill over? Why can’t you just play basketball, have a good time, and just be a good person, and just enjoy your life?”
As he confronted those questions later in his career, World Peace says, “I started to become the player that I wanted to become.”
If there’s anything the former Ron Artest has learned through his journey—if there’s anything he has taught all of us—it’s that everyone can evolve; that even one of the most vilified athletes in modern history can redeem himself; that even a player who thrives on aggression and physicality can tamp down his emotions, without losing what makes him great.
Metta World Peace found a healthy equilibrium. Dennis Rodman seemingly never did. And Draymond Green? He’s working on it.
“I’m rooting for him,” World Peace says, “to find a balance.”
That balance has been elusive throughout Green’s 12-year NBA career—never more alarmingly than during a 28-day span this past winter, when the Golden State Warriors star was ejected and suspended twice for violent acts: the first, a chokehold of Minnesota’s Rudy Gobert, leading to a five-game ban; the second, a swinging whack to the jaw of Phoenix’s Jusuf Nurkic, resulting in an indefinite suspension on Dec. 13. The NBA also ordered Green to complete a list of conditions for reinstatement, which included counseling. The suspension lasted about a month, costing him 12 games.
Since returning, Green has generally maintained his composure and resumed his elite defensive play, helping spark a midseason Warriors revival. They’re 14-7 with him back in the lineup, and one of the NBA’s hottest teams over the past six weeks.
“He’s just perfectly finding the line, walking the line,” coach Steve Kerr recently said of Green. “We didn’t want him to come back passive. We still wanted him to yell at the refs; we just didn’t want him to get kicked out. He’s one of the great competitors in the game. So he has to play with fire, energy, and passion. And he’s doing that, but he’s just walking the line beautifully.”
Indefinite suspensions in this league are rare. But NBA officials considered Green’s messy history, which includes punching then-teammate Jordan Poole during a practice in October 2022 and stomping on the chest of Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis in a playoff game last spring, along with an extensive catalog of technicals and flagrant fouls over the past dozen years.
Physicality, aggression, ferocity, and a general edginess have long defined Green. Those traits—along with his intellect and playmaking—helped fuel his remarkable rise, from a 2012 second-round draft pick to all-world defender, four-time champion, and lock for the Hall of Fame. It’s what made him Draymond Green—pillar of the Warriors dynasty, Stephen Curry’s playmaking soulmate, and one of the most respected players of his generation.
Except, of course, when all that passion and aggression spill into chaos. Green isn’t the first NBA star to struggle with intense emotions, self-control, and occasional mayhem. Artest and Rodman were serial offenders in their time. Vernon “Mad Max” Maxwell—who won two rings with the Houston Rockets in the mid-’90s—once went into the stands in Portland to punch a heckler. Charles Barkley had numerous scraps on the court and was twice arrested for punching people off the court—once in a bar, once in a parking lot. (Green was also arrested and charged with misdemeanor assault and battery for slapping a Michigan State football player in July 2016; he paid a $500 fine as part of a plea agreement but served no jail time.)
In sports, we celebrate players for their intensity, toughness, and tenacity. We even cheer the hard fouls and sneering and taunting—at least, if it’s coming from a player we like. These things are encouraged, cultivated. And if a player sometimes crosses the line, well, teammates and coaches might say, “You have to let Dennis be Dennis,” or “Let Barkley be Barkley”—as if taming their impulses might snuff out what makes them special.
Nonsense, says Barkley.
“We’ve all crossed the line many times,” says the Hall of Fame player, now a TNT analyst. “And you have to say, ‘Man, you know what? I gotta stop the bullshit.’ Because when is it overboard? When it hurts the team. That’s what you gotta ask yourself.”
And that, Barkley says, is where Green finds himself now. The Gobert and Nurkic incidents resulted in Green missing 17 games—plus an additional four while he regained his conditioning in January. The Warriors went 10-11 in those games—a big reason why they’re currently 10th in the Western Conference, jockeying for a play-in spot instead of a guaranteed playoff berth.
The Warriors are dominating again now, looking very much like a potential contender—if Curry can sustain his MVP-like play, if young studs like Jonathan Kuminga and Brandin Podziemski can stay steady, and if Green can stay on the rails.
It prompts a natural question: How will Green control himself now, when he’s failed so many times before? Why will this time be any different? Pundits and cynics all have their own answers: He can’t. Or, he might, but then he’ll lose what made him great. Or, he’s just doing and saying the right things (including counseling) to protect his money (a $100 million contract signed last summer).
To which Green responds: I can change, I will still be me and no, it’s not about the money—or even entirely about any obligations to Kerr, Curry, and Klay Thompson.
“It’s fear of letting my family down,” Green says. “Fear of letting my kids down. Fear of my kids having to deal with things, more than they already have to deal with just being my kid. Fear of what my wife has to deal with. That’s what it is for me.”
When Green, speaking on his podcast in mid-January, alluded to thoughts of retirement during the darkest days of his suspension, it was his family—wife Hazel Renee and their young children—that were weighing on his psyche. “One hundred percent,” he says.
“Obviously, I have obligations to this team, to guys in particular—Steph, my word that I gave to [team owner] Joe Lacob, my word that I gave to Steve Kerr, [general manager] Mike Dunleavy, my teammates—obviously all of that matters. And that’s right at the top of the list. But not letting my family down is above all.”
The “how” in these matters is harder to define or describe. The most notorious moments of Green’s career, the things that got him ejected or suspended—a swing, a punch, a stomp, a tirade—are split-second decisions, if you can even call them decisions at all. The common refrain, “What was Player X thinking?” is probably the wrong question entirely. Because these are moments of impulse, not thought.
For Green, this discussion gets a little existential. As he tells it, there are effectively two Draymond Greens—and yes, he’s aware of how that sounds.
“The person that I am, sitting here talking to you, is not the person I am on the basketball court,” Green says, lounging in the visitors locker room at Madison Square Garden after a recent victory over the Knicks. “They’re not the same person. And it’s almost like”—and here Green stops and chuckles—”I know I probably sound crazy talking to you like this, like I got an alter ego or something, but when I’m competing on the court, when I’m doing my job, that’s not the same person you’re going to deal with on a daily basis. … And I’m totally fine with that.”
All of which is evident, if you’ve ever listened to Green’s press conferences, tuned into his podcasts, or watched his periodic contributions on TNT’s Inside the NBA. Off the court, he’s long been one of the NBA’s most thoughtful, intelligent, and yes, likable personalities. There’s a reason why Curry, who might be the most universally liked player of the last 20 years, remains so loyal to Green despite their vastly different on-court personas. The real Draymond has a lot more in common with Curry than the Draymond who sometimes loses control on the court.
“I tell people all the time: If I had $1 for every time someone said to me, ‘Wow, you’re nothing like I thought.’ … It’s because you were judging me (from) the basketball court,” Green says. “If I had $1 for every time someone said that, I’d be way richer than I am now.”
Asked what he thinks when he watches a replay of his own worst moments, Green starts to answer, then pauses for a full five seconds. “I think it’s more of, Where was I in that moment? Because in those moments, me who’s talking to you right now needs to be there sometimes. … You have this guy who plays basketball, who fucking does whatever he has to do to win. Then you have this guy who’s extremely thoughtful, who’s intelligent, who’s aware of everything. Sometimes that guy has to show up for this guy. Because the reality is, that guy [on the court] isn’t as thoughtful.”
Every player who’s ever been stamped a troublemaker, a line stepper, an agitator, or to use Barkley’s term, a knucklehead, has faced a moment of truth: control yourself, or risk losing everything.
For Barkley, it was after one of his arrests, though he can’t recall for sure which. He thinks it was after his Orlando bar fight in 1997, which ended with him throwing a 20-year-old patron through a plate-glass window. He would soon be summoned to Manhattan, to the offices of NBA commissioner David Stern.
“I went over the edge many times,” Barkley recalls. “Then David Stern told me to grow the fuck up and quit doing it. ... He says, ‘You got to make a decision. Do you want to be a great player? Or do you want to be a sideshow?’”
Barkley says that was the critical moment of his career. For World Peace, it was more of a gradual process—though his season-ending suspension for the Malice at the Palace in 2004 was surely the main catalyst. After that came years of therapy and learning new techniques for regulating stress, including yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation.
“I had to take off of my intensity,” World Peace says, “because when I was talking to my therapist, intensity was not a safe space for me. Your body doesn’t understand the difference between emotion at a high level, whether it’s positive, or at a low level, if it’s negative. It’s just high emotion.” And when he retired in 2017, he says, “I was actually really relieved, because I have nothing to get emotional about.”
During his latest suspension, Green says he received valued advice from Kerr, a heartfelt chat with Commissioner Adam Silver, and wisdom from another friend and confidant, Clippers coach Tyronn Lue.
“Coach Kerr, he’s always been talking to me about finding that balance: `You have to find the line, and I know you’re capable of finding the line,’” Green says.
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Lue cautioned Green that he can’t change his demeanor entirely, reasoning, “It’s what’s gotten you here.” But Lue said something else that resonated. “He said, ‘But it can’t be everything. You can’t be going at your coaches, going at your teammates, going at the other team, going at the referees. It can’t be everybody. So what of those can you cut off?’” Lue noticed that Green had stopped chewing out his own coaches. And his role as the Warriors’ defensive conscience and emotional leader requires him to challenge his teammates. As a competitor, he’s still going to get into verbal scrapes with opponents.
So, Lue concluded, leave the refs alone. “Referees don’t change calls,” Green says, repeating Lue’s advice. “They don’t get every call right. So that’s what can change. He’s like, ‘And if you change that, you’ll be just fine.’ And that was huge for me, because that is walking that line. I think I still walk the line, right? But I don’t think I’ve gotten near going over it. And I think that’s a big reason why.”
Indeed, in the 21 games since returning from suspension, Green has been on relatively good behavior while remaining as feisty as ever. He’s picked up two technicals—one for trash-talking Jazz rookie Keyonte George (who also got a tech) and the other for jawing back and forth with Nurkic after a foul in a mid-February rematch.
And there have been some close calls. In his fourth game back, Green clobbered the Lakers’ Anthony Davis across the face with an overzealous intentional foul in the final seconds of regulation; he then barked a profanity at the Lakers’ Jarred Vanderbilt, who was calling for a review and a flagrant. But no flagrant foul was called, and things quickly settled down. In a February 14 game, Clippers center Mason Plumlee hammered Podziemski with a hard foul, setting off a minor fracas, with Green being held back by teammates. Kuminga got a tech for going after Plumlee. Lue was ejected. But Green? Unscathed.
“He knows that for us to succeed, he can’t lose his mind and go berserk,” Kerr says. “We’ve had that discussion.” They also agreed on some limits, especially regarding the referees. “If he starts going at a ref, I’m going to take him out of the game,” Kerr says. “He wants me to do that.”
If techs and flagrants and general outbursts are mostly about self-control, it’s safe to say Green has struggled with the on-off switch for years. Coming into this season, he’d accrued 129 technical fouls over the prior nine seasons (not counting playoffs)—an average of 14 per season, or one every six games, among the highest rates in the league. He’d also earned 10 flagrant fouls in that time, about one per season, all of the flagrant-1 variety. Until the incidents with Gobert and Nurkic this season, Green hadn’t earned a flagrant 2 in the regular season since 2013. (He did earn a flagrant 2 for his stomp on Sabonis in the 2023 playoffs.) He’s been suspended six times in a 12-year career and ejected 20 times, nine shy of Rasheed Wallace’s record.
But if the question is Can Draymond Green self-regulate?, the answer is yes. Put another way: He’s played in 951 games in the NBA, regular season and playoffs combined, and in the vast majority of them did not earn a tech or a flagrant. And incidents earlier in his career were mostly garden-variety infractions and dustups—not nearly as violent as the more recent episodes.
“Even the most impulsive people can control their impulses,” says Dr. Mitch Abrams, a sports psychologist and expert in anger management and sports. “But sometimes it’s harder (for some) than others. And if you are so motivated, and the consequences are severe enough, you’re going to change. But I would bet that from Draymond’s point of view, the reward for his aggressiveness far outweighs any suspension.”
As Abrams sees it, the NBA and the Warriors gave Green too much latitude in the past, allowing his behavior to escalate unchecked. But then, it’s also the nature of professional sports to tolerate and even encourage a certain brand of aggression.
“I think that that’s where he’s been failed, that he has not been held accountable in a way that would get the behavior to disappear,” Abrams says. “Now, that said, you could also make the counterargument that if he was held accountable, and he toned down the aggressiveness, he might never have gotten to be as successful as he is.
“There’s so much systemic stuff that goes into reinforcing his aggressiveness,” Abrams adds, “that it is completely understandable for him to lose track of where the line is.”
Abrams, who works with all types of clients, from athletes to prison inmates, says it’s also important to distinguish between types of aggression—one that’s more goal oriented (e.g., pursuing a loose ball) and one that’s more reactive (e.g., shoving an opponent after a hard foul).
“What we’re trying to do in anger management, we’re really not talking about anger management—what we’re trying to do is reactive aggression prevention,” Abrams says. Although he has not worked with Green, Abrams says his approach would be: “I don’t want him to not be aggressive. I just don’t want him to engage in reactive aggression, because that’s what leads to the technicals and the suspensions and all the rest of that stuff.”
Green has crossed the line and come back before, with earnest promises of better behavior. But Kerr says this time feels different “because of the stakes. Because this is the first time where we’re really talking about severe consequences.” Silver might not have torn into Green with threats and f-bombs, the way Stern once did with Barkley (“No, he did not,” Green confirms, chuckling), but the possibility of a longer ban, or worse, was clearly in play.
“In the past, he didn’t care if he got suspended for a game,” Kerr says. “And I didn’t care either. Until the Jordan Poole punch last year, pretty much everything was just, like, inconsequential. … Even when he and I got into it in OKC (in February 2016, at halftime in the locker room), and that was well publicized, it was just a screaming match. I can handle that. But what’s happened over the last year is serious. The Gobert choke, the swinging at Nurkic, punching a teammate, the Sabonis stomp, all that. That’s been a different level.”
As different as Green and World Peace are—as players, as people, even in the degree of their transgressions—they relate to each other’s quest to find balance, and what that journey sometimes entails. World Peace speaks openly about growing up poor in a crime-riddled part of Queens, New York; about the days he went hungry, the way it all shaped him and put “an edge on my shoulder.”
“As I learned more about my history, I stopped blaming myself,” World Peace says. “I learned about my family history, and I dug deep in terms of learning about my culture. And I learned about where I was from. I even went down my family tree, I learned about the history, I went through the history of America, I went through the history before we got to America. Because all of that has played a part in the road to today. … Now you’re being developed into a ‘tough kid from the projects.’ When you understand that, now you start to understand yourself. I’m not going to blame myself anymore. I’m going to accept anything that was in the past.”
When all of that is relayed to Green, he nods in agreement. “Exactly,” he says. Like World Peace, Green says he’s been confronting and processing his own history in therapy, which is ongoing—and which, he quickly notes, is not the sort of thing people embraced during his childhood in Saginaw, Michigan.
“That’s not something I want to stop,” Green says of therapy, “because bettering myself is always something that I’m working on. And those are things that have helped me better myself. And continue to move forward in different things in my life, not just basketball.”
“The reality is we all got trauma,” Green says. “How do you deal with that trauma? Sometimes that trauma is touching you, and you don’t even know it’s touching you. You start doing this work, you find shit that you’re like, ‘Hold on, where the fuck did that come from?’ Now I uncovered this shit, now you can’t just leave the shit sitting there. Now you got to do the work. You start doing all these things. And you start uncovering shit that you did not know you were looking for.”
That’s the work Draymond Green is doing now, in the quiet moments between games and practices and shootarounds. It’s the commitment he’s made to the league, to his teammates, to his family, and to himself. It doesn’t mean everything is magically fixed, or that he won’t screw up again along the way—just that he’s doing what he can to be better, one day and one possession at a time, ever mindful that his time on this stage is finite.
“I’m far closer to the end than I am the beginning,” says Green, who turned 34 on Monday. “Do you want the end to look like complete shit? Or do you want the end to look closer to how it looked in the beginning? Do you want to leave gracefully? Or do you want to leave like a fucking asshole? Do you want your legacy to be a guy who couldn’t contain himself, a guy who couldn’t finish the job? Or do you want your legacy to be a guy who did it his way, yes, but did it the right way? I think that’s what it boils down to.”
Nearly two decades ago, it was Ron Artest who was confronting similar questions and a career-defining challenge, albeit under far more extreme circumstances. His evolution didn’t erase any of his sins, but it did give him the chance for a rebirth of sorts (with or without a name change), and an opportunity to make a positive impact on the public stage.
We already know Draymond Green, the defensive maestro and NBA champion. We’re well acquainted with Draymond Green, the chaos agent and provocateur. Which Draymond Green we ultimately remember is up to Draymond Green.
