Draymond Green‘s rugged play and trash-talking antics have a bit of an old school feel to them, a certain nostalgia of the 80s and 90s game that somehow got lost within the evolution of the league and is seldom seen within the confines of the hardwood today.
The Golden State Warriors forward was compared to junk-talk extraordinaire and Inside The NBA panelist Charles Barkley, who wasn't afraid to take on all comers when it came to verbal wars on the court. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't very thrilled about it.
“Hell no,” he told reporters when hearing of the comparison. “I'm the modern-day Draymond Green. F*** no.”
“I was raised by Mary Babers. In the Babers family, that's what you do. You speak your mind. It ain't got nothing to do with Chuck. I wasn't a Charles Barkley fan growing up. No disrespect to Chuck. He's a great player, but as I got older, I watched his game because I knew he was undersized and the things that he could do, I tried to add some of that stuff to my game. But nah, he didn't influence me at all.”
Green, who gathered even more notoriety for his verbal antics during the four-game series against the Portland Trail Blazers, has even detailed the beauty behind the lost art of trash-talking and how it influences the way opponents react to it.
Like Barkley, he is an undersized power forward willing to run the floor and make plays, out-speeding bigger matchups and out-muscling smaller defenders while being an equal opportunity shot blocker at the rim.
“[Chuck] told y'all in '90-what that he wasn't your kid's role model anyway… so there you have it,” Green said. “He wasn't my role model. I grew up in Saginaw, Michigan. That's what you do, you talk, you talk junk during basketball. That's how I was raised. I was raised in a family like that, so I didn't need a Charles Barkley to influence me.”
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