Draymond Green opened up in full about his infamous locker room tiff with Kevin Durant in 2018 during their time together as members of the Golden State Warriors. Green appeared as a guest in the All The Smoke podcast, confiding in hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson about the turmoil that took place after the two were separated from a screaming match.
Transcript per Drew Shiller of NBC Sports Bay Area:
“I met with Steve Kerr and Bob Myers when we landed. My fiancee was on the team plane with us, so she's sitting in the car — I turned the heat on, she sitting in the car, I'm thinking the meeting is gonna be quick — I'm in the meeting at the airport terminal for like an hour and 45 minutes with them.
“And they're pretty much telling me you were wrong, you (need to) apologize. And my thing to them was — I told ya'll this. Yeah, it boiled over but this shouldn't be no surprise to nobody. I told ya'll what it was … they kept telling me you need to apologize. And I'm like, ‘I'm not f***ing apologizing. He's one foot in and one foot out. I meant what I said. I'm not f***ing apologizing for something I meant to say.”
What entailed wasn't what Green was expecting, as the Warriors were prepared to take extreme measures to make this story evaporate.
“After an hour and 45 minutes, they're like, ‘You go home, you meet us in the morning. You sleep on it, maybe you'll feel different,'” Green recalled. “We meet and they're like, ‘So you gonna apologize?' And I'm like, ‘I'm not apologizing.' So then Steve tells me, ‘All right, well we're gonna suspend you for tonight's game.' No, Bob said it.
“I started laughing. He's like, ‘Well that's not the response I expected you to have.' I'm like, ‘Well, I feel like you're suspending me to try to save Kevin — to try to make him feel good. Because that's bulls***. I ain't never seen no player get suspended for arguing with another player.
“I told them ya'll gonna make a mistake suspending me because the only person that can fix this is me … they still did it … so I kind of patched it up. But it never was the same after that. But to me, it wasn't the same before that and it hadn't been the same for at least a year. It had just gone from bad to worse.”
Green and the Warriors did a spectacular job in letting this huge argument fizzle out, as Green found a way to talk with Durant and smooth things out. The Warriors continued to mount an assault on the league even if Green and Durant weren't the same after that argument.
However, this argument could have easily been the straw that broke the camel's back as Durant admittedly knew he would leave Golden State midway through the 2018-19 season.
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