Warriors' Draymond Green wards off Giannis Antetokounmpo as winning streak reaches six

Give ground, Draymond Green believes, and you’ve already lost. Let someone push you without pushing them back, and you have won the battle on the high road but lost the war of respect. And it was for these reasons, ultimately, that Green justified his Monday night takedown of 20-year-old Suns center Khaman Maluach, a player with seven inches on Green but ceding 16 years. 

“Let me help y’all understand how this works,” Green told listeners on a Wednesday episode of his podcast, after being ejected against Phoenix. “You must stand on that type of timing as a big man. If you don’t, your paint will get all – your paint get ran through, no rim protection. Because there’s no respect after that. So that play must happen. And doing what I do and playing the position I play, that must happen.”

No apology. No remorse. None needed, if you asked the Golden State Warriors. And Green himself wasn’t really needed against Phoenix, a team down its starting center in Mark Williams. Monday night’s crash-out was a calculation, a long gambit, with the knowledge of the seven-foot behemoths that’ll cycle through Green’s court at Chase Center this season and the “different nastiness” – as he put it on air – he’ll once again need to grapple with them.

Enter Miami, on Thursday night. Enter Giannis Antetokounmpo, the big fish who landed in South Beach waters despite repeated casts from out in the Bay. Enter Bam Adebayo. Enter the Goliaths, against this aging David, long prone to firing rocks at eyes or nether regions to grapple with titans.
And Green hunkered down amid the trees and darted, and scrapped, and clawed, enough to put Miami away in a 120-100 win over the Heat and ensure a six-game winning streak for the Warriors.

“Being able to have him out there against Giannis makes me sleep a lot better going into the game,” Warriors coach Steve Kerr said pregame of Green, “knowing that he’s going to be there directing traffic and getting people into the right spots. I mean, he’s still a brilliant defender.”

In Year 15, the sheer swing between Green’s impact as an offensive shot creator and a defensive shot preventer has never been more drastic. He entered Thursday’s game averaging all of 3.2 points in 26.5 minutes per game, and finished with exactly two against Miami. He took two threes almost out of obligation. He has rarely ever sought his own offense for a decade, since he was a 25-year-old cornerstone back in 2015-16; this is different. This is Green avoiding the entire concept of scoring.

Fine, by Kerr. 

“Because of Yaxel (Lendeborg), Dray’s basically our 5 this year,” Kerr said pregame. “And only a few times have we played him at the 4. And I think, as a result, he’s much more of a playmaker.

“I really don’t care – I don’t think Draymond’s shot attempts, offensive aggression for this team, is a barometer, like maybe it has been the last couple years,” Kerr continued, a few words later.

What is a barometer? His fight, defensively. The Warriors have no other choice to be competitive this season, with Kristaps Porzingis all but gone. They need a healthy and engaged and primed Green for 60-plus games in 2026-27, or they will crumple from the inside out. 

At every opportunity, through seven games, Green has brought his best. Three-time MVP Nikola Jokic finished with 19 points on 8-for-18 shooting in the Warriors’ win over the Nuggets on Oct. 26. Timberwolves tower Rudy Gobert was played off the floor completely Oct. 28, with one point and four rebounds. In the locker room in Minnesota, postgame, guard Gary Payton II shrugged when asked about the Warriors’ ability to cobble together a center rotation for 82 games.

“We got Draymond,” Payton II said, then. “We gon’ figure it out.”

This looked, for a few minutes, like it could be a long night for Golden State, as the superhero-muscled Antetokounmpo hit a few first-half jumpers in a sign of trouble. Ban Adebayo, too, took a cleaver to the Warriors’ interior at times, grabbing a second-quarter rebound and finishing an and-one layup right over reserve Charles Bassey. 

But 40-year-old Al Horford provided a quick counter to build a wall in front of Antetokounmpo – even throwing up a two-hand tip in the third quarter – and finished a remarkable +21 in just 18 minutes. Bassey, too, provided a stouter front in the second half, a main contributor as superstar Antetokounmpo tallied just one point in seven fourth-quarter minutes. 

In the fourth quarter, with Golden State holding firm on a 15-point lead, Antetokounmpo went at the 6-foot-6 Green with full steam. His head lowered. He went up. And his shot went back, ping-ponging down the court 20 seconds later and into the hands of Stephen Curry, the two-man impact that has led basketball in the Bay for more than a decade. 

Curry splashed, en route to a 29-point performance. Green roared. Vintage, if aging.

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This article originally published at Warriors’ Draymond Green wards off Giannis Antetokounmpo as winning streak reaches six.