By Leobert Julian A. de la Peña
Golden State Warriors’ Draymond Green announced last January 9, 2024, that he contemplated retirement amid his NBA suspension due to a series of on-court misconduct during the past months.
In an episode of his podcast The Draymond Green Show, the NBA multi-champion revealed that he told league commissioner Adam Silver about retiring from the sport.
“I told him, this is too much for me. This is too much. It’s all becoming too much for me. And I’m going to retire,” Green told his viewers in his podcast episode.
Last December 18, 2023, Joe Dumars, the NBA’s Executive President and the Head of Basketball Operations, announced that the veteran power forward would be suspended for at least three weeks.
Aside from his suspension, the NBA also announced that Green will be undergoing counseling and will be cooperating with the Warriors franchise and the league committee.
In retrospect, Green was involved in a past melee against the Minnesota Timberwolves when he choked Gobert.
With only two minutes gone in the very first quarter of the Western Conference clash, Warriors’ shooting guard Klay Thompson and Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels got into it after pulling each other’s jerseys in the middle of the court.
After the referees whistled to stop the physical altercation, Gobert came in and grabbed Thompson by bear-hugging him.
Green then noticed what Gobert did to Thompson which forced him to headlock Minnesota’s starting center while dragging him to the other side of the court.
Both Thompson and McDaniels were whistled for technical fouls and ejection while Green was slapped with a Flagrant 2 foul and also exited the game.
After his incident with the Timberwolves, Green repeated his on-court misconduct last December 13, 2023, when he was whistled for a Flagrant Foul 2 after hitting Suns’ Jusuf Nurkic in the face.
Green was jockeying for position during an inbound play and was tightly guarded by Nurkic in the baseline. After a few seconds, the big man was caught swinging his arm that went directly to the center’s jaw.
With the successive unfortunate outings that happened to Green, the NBA then decided to slap him with an indefinite suspension plus counseling.
As of now, Green is back with the Warriors and already participated in their practice session. When asked about what he felt after the league lifted his suspension, he responded: “It’s urgent from a professional standpoint because I wasn’t hurt. At least, my body wasn’t hurt. My mind was hurting, my feelings was hurt, but it wasn’t like some injury caused me off the court. It’s very urgent because I’ve cost my team enough. I’ve cost this organization enough.”
