There are a lot of reason to be upset that we’re not getting Spurs/Warriors in this year’s Western Conference Finals. Not necessarily because Thunder/Warriors will be bad – odds are it’s going to be an outstanding series – but because there are so many fun storylines in a Spurs/Warriors series.
One under the radar reasons is the matchup that would happen between Draymond Green and Tim Duncan, a new school vs. old school meeting between the best and most unique power forward in the league against the best power forward of all-time.
It would be a player match that wouldn’t feature a ton of trash talk, either. That’s not a surprise from the Duncan side of things, but it is with Green, who is considered one of the best and most ruthless trash talkers in the league. As it turns out, Green has a reason for not trash talking Duncan, which he explained to The Undefeated.
“I do have a Tim Duncan story. My rookie year I kind of talked junk to everybody. In the middle of the game I started talking to Tim, and I had already got into it with somebody on their team. I don’t remember who it was. But I started talking to Tim and he kind of just stared at me. I just kept talking junk to him and he kept staring at me.
“At that point I realized during the rest of my career that I might as well not talk to him. Either, one, he is not going to talk back because he has no respect for me. Or, two, he is not going to talk back because that is who he is. Or, three, both. I figured then that was the last time I would talk junk to Tim. And that was the last time.”
Imagining Green manning up Kawhi Leonard or someone else on the Spurs, talking mad junk, switching onto Duncan, and immediately shutting up is kind of funny. There’s a chance that this never happens again, so hopefully Green got his money’s worth of silence in his last meeting with The Big Fundamental.
