Draymond Green is always up to talk junk, and there isn’t much you can do to stop him. It doesn’t matter what your stature is in the league, because if he has something to say about you, then he’s going to say it. If he gets in your head then that’s a victory for him, because that’s where he wants to exist — he wants to get everybody off their game with his words.
Even off the court, Green will endlessly talk to anybody that’s willing to listen to him, which makes him one of the NBA’s most fascinating players. So when he did a sit-down interview with ESPN the Magazine, you knew what he was going to say would be of interest, especially when he started to talk about who he will and won’t talk trash to. Nobody is safe from Green, but he also doesn’t waste time on someone he knows it won’t be effective on, such as NBA legends Tim Duncan and Kobe Bryant.
“The guy I’d never waste my breath on? Tim Duncan. As a rookie, I tried talking junk to Tim, and he was like a tree staring back at me. [Laughs] No expression. I said, “All right. It’s over.” Never talked junk to him again. After that, anytime he fell, I’d be the first person to help him up, like I was his teammate. [Laughs] I also tried talking junk to Kobe [Bryant], maybe my second year. On a potential game winner, Mark Jackson put me in to guard him, and I got the stop. I said, “Yeah, I’m locking that s— up!” He looked at me like I was crazy and said, “That miss ain’t got nothing to do with you. Sit down.” I said, “Oh, s—! All right, I’m out.”
This story is hilarious, not just because of the players involved, but you really can see Duncan staring back at Green like he doesn’t even exist to him, as if Green’s trash talk was so beneath him that it didn’t deserve his acknowledgment. That, in a way, was Duncan’s own form of trash talk. He had so little reason to respond to you talking to him that it was almost intimidating in a way.
Bryant, on the other hand, was just so intense that Green straight up got benched for talking trash to him. Green was a young dude who was maybe still learning his way around the league, but Jackson knew that nothing good could come from him prodding Kobe and turned it into a learning experience. Plus Jackson had probably heard stories of people trying to get in Kobe’s head and it ending miserably, so he was trying to protect Green from Kobe going at him the next time they played.
Even though Green didn’t have much success with these two, you know he’s never going to stop talking. He said in the interview that he’ll even get his teammate, Steph Curry, angry in practice sometimes with the trash talk he throws out there. He also explains why he made fun of Paul Pierce’s retirement tour, the Warriors decision to not visit the White House, and an apparent fear of owls. Of everybody in the NBA, there is nobody that’s more fun to listen to talk than Green.
