The Golden State Warriors are gunning for their third straight championship this season, and as they go deeper into the playoffs, Draymond Green can't help but look back at the team's humble beginnings.

The Warriors have been a bad team for the majority of their existence in the NBA. That all changed when they drafted Stephen Curry in 2008, Klay Thompson in 2011, and Green in 2012. But even before they became champions, they had to go through some roadblocks, one of which was beating the Memphis Grizzlies back in the 2015 playoffs.

Green recalled how beating the Grizzlies felt in an interview with The Athletic's Tim Kawakami:

“That ’14-15 season, another important moment for us was those first couple years we could not beat the Grizzlies. Like, they owned us. That ’14-15 season, it was different. Our style of play had kind of changed up, which in turn was the beginning of the style of play changing around the NBA as a whole. But they had two bigs, Z-Bo and Marc, and we struggled with them. But the ’14-15 season was different.”

Before the Warriors eliminated the Grizzlies in the Western Conference Semifinals that year, the latter had won 12 of their last 15 regular-season matchups. For Green, to beat Memphis in the playoffs was extremely satisfying:

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“I think that was huge in us believing, as well. Even more so than the Clippers. It was hey, here we go. Because we really … the whole time against the Clippers, the games were close, they were edgy and shit. But against the Grizzlies, we couldn’t do nothing with them. And then all of sudden, it was like, all right, we may be on our way.
That was big. We got down 2-1 in that series. Felt like the world was collapsing on us. It was, oh, shit, what do we do now? But then we won that Game 4, switched up our matchups and the way we were defending them. They didn’t stand a chance after that.

I remember the way we were guarding them (by switching Bogut onto Allen), they sat Tony Allen. Once they sat Tony Allen, they didn’t have a chance because then they weren’t good enough defensively. Tony Allen was so fucking great defensively that he used to fuck our whole offense up. But once we completely took him out of the game on the other end and they couldn’t play him, they were done. Because at that point, they couldn’t defend us at all.”

Memphis played an old-school style with two of the best bigs in the league during their peak years in Marc Gasol and Zach Randolph. However, the Warriors' 3-point shooting was too much for them to handle, and the Grizzlies simply couldn't match their firepower.