Building on a Defensive-Player-of-the-Year-worthy season, Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green has tapped into the individual intricacies that it takes to guard some of the best players in the league. Russell Westbrook, for one, an athletic phenom of his own kind, able to score at will, set up others, and rebound at a maniacal pace for a 6-foot-3 guard, is one of the hardest ones to stop — but Green has discovered a way to put the clamps on him.

“I see Russ a lot,” Green told Bleacher Report's Ric Bucher, a former Warriors sideline reporter. “The way I like to defend Russell is sometimes I like to sit back and make him shoot jump shots and sometimes activate and force him to go to the rim.”

“As crazy as that sounds — most people would say, ‘Why would you send Russell to the rim, that's what he wants to do?' [And it's true] the best thing about Russell's game is not his jump shot. If you're going to pick any shot for Russell Westbrook to take, it's his jump shot.

“That being said, when you think that way, the tendency is to sit back. But when you sit back, you allow him to get comfortable and then he just picks you apart. I'm a firm believer you definitely mix that in and use sitting back to your advantage, but you've got to activate and pressure sometimes to keep [him] off balance and not let him get in his comfort zone.

“He has a hop into that pull-up jump shot; he takes these tiny steps and then a hop. You can definitely read it a little bit. That being said, it's still tough to stop. But you can get a jump on it.”

Green seems to have picked up on all the little tendencies of Westbrook's game, making him quite comfortable whenever he's caught in a switch and Klay Thompson is unavailable to pick him up on D. The undersized forward has realized that once the scouting has been done on a player, it becomes a chess match between the ball-handler and the defender, which now bumps the competition to yet another level.

The Warriors are 4-0 against the Thunder this season, and aside from Westbrook's 47-point outburst (his only game shooting over 35 percent in the series), they've managed to contain him to 16-of-54 from the field (29.6 percent) — his worst combined shooting percentage against any team this season.