SAN FRANCISCO — Draymond Green didn’t mind that microphones picked up him screaming at teammate Buddy Hield to lock in — “Wake the (expletive) up or go sit the (expletive) down!” — during the Warriors’ 109-105 win over Phoenix on Saturday night.
The message was necessary in the moment, and when you say something with your chest, as Green often does, backtracking dulls your point.
“Mics catch everything today, but I don’t care,” Green said at the postgame podium. “Because anything I’ll say, I’ll say it right into the mic. I don’t give a damn. It was needed.”
Green’s plea came after a 24-second violation in which Green had to hoist up a grenade at the end of the possession. Hield missed a read on a post pass, which bungled Golden State’s set.
In the game, Hield went scoreless on 0-for-7 shooting and appeared to let his shooting struggles seep into his defense at times.
A new Warrior, Hield has been streaky. In games he scores at least 18 points, the Warriors are 8-0. They’re 3-10 when he finishes in single digits.
Enter Green’s admonishment.
“We need Buddy Hield to play great, we need Buddy Hield to make shots,” Green said. “And we have all the confidence in the world that Buddy’s going to make shots. But we’ve got a post feed, you’ve got a 6-foot guy on you? Get the ball here. It’s simple. We’re 16-15. We don’t love this. So do we just keep doing the same thing and sit back on our hands, ‘Oh, it’s going to change at some point.’ Or do we make a change?
“I know what it looks like to win. I know what it takes to win. So as a leader, it’s on you to figure out what it takes to help this team. If that’s mixing it up with a guy every now and then, if that’s yelling, then you do that.”
Green and Hield have only been teammates for 31 games. The four-time champion said he’s trying to find what makes Hield tick. That requires trialing different styles of leadership. On Saturday night, he broke out the “wake the (expletive) up” method.
“You have to try different methods,” Green said. “Some guys — Jonathan Kuminga, I go to, and I say, ‘This is what I need you to do, look at this this way and go do it.’ If I yell at him, I don’t think he’s going to do it. He ain’t going to listen. He’s going to get out of here. Steph, sometimes I go to him, sometimes I yell at him. He reacts to both.”
Green learned from Michigan State head coach Tom Izzo that leadership requires having a feel for every individual. By connecting with everyone on a one-on-one level, the sum of the parts add up.
“If you think you’re going to lead a team, you’re an idiot — you have to lead guys that make up a team,” Green said. “Leading someone doesn’t look the same as leading the next guy. You’ve got to figure out what makes guys tick, what gets a guy going. I’m still figuring that out.”
Green said he and Hield went back and forth after his profanities, which he welcomes. That type of conversation is normal on a basketball court. Healthy, even.
It’s important to be someone who can receive a shouting message, Green said. He noted that he had no problem with Dennis Schroder — who just joined the team two weeks ago — going at him recently. Same with Kyle Anderson.
Green has always been a vocal leader, and it hasn’t always worked out for him. His infamous argument with Kevin Durant on the bench in 2018 earned him a suspension and sowed tension within the team. He recently called the Jordan Poole punch “one of my biggest failures as a vet.”
But Green is generally regarded as an excellent teammate. He’s an X’s and O’s expert, competitive beast and organizational pillar. Coach Steve Kerr has raved about Green’s influence this year especially.
In the third quarter against the Suns, he was just trying to get through to Hield.
“To go at Buddy the way I did, we needed that in that moment,” Green said. “We’re flat, we’d just turned the ball over. Lock in.”
The big-picture goal is to create a culture of accountability. Earlier this season, Kerr said the beauty of coaching Curry is that “he lets me yell at him.” During a timeout against Boston, Kerr lit into Curry for an ill-advised turnover. Curry later said he just wants to be coached like anyone else.
When players like Green and Curry are fine with getting chewed out, the rest of the locker room notices.
Including Hield.
“I’ve happened to play in a lot of championship basketball, lot of meaningful basketball,” Green said. “Buddy hasn’t had the opportunity to play a lot of meaningful basketball in this league. Guess what? It’s our job to make sure he understands what that means. And if people don’t like it, so be it. That’s why they don’t have four championships and I do.”
