Even on nights when he notches a triple-single, Draymond Green has a knack for making himself the main character.
During and after the Golden State Warriors’ equalizer against the Boston Celtics in Sunday’s Game 2 of the NBA Finals, it was the non-basketball stuff that gained attention. There was the early lead-blocking of Grant Williams — a play that resulted in Williams getting dinged with a personal foul — and the elbow joust shortly thereafter that earned Green a technical. There was the general and persistent huffiness: the butting in on referees’ conferences, the motivational stylings that even the aggro-est of travel-team dads might deem a little much. The apex came when Green crashed into Jaylen Brown on a 3-pointer, used him as a footrest and shoved him in the back in the span of a five-second spat — and somehow avoided a night-ending second tech. Postgame, Green termed his contributions an “attitude adjustment.” “If I’m not sending that message,” he said, “who is sending that message?”
It took more than making a scowlier face, though, to slow down the team that outscored the Warriors by 24 fourth-quarter points in Game 1. Maybe the most telling sequence, for Green and the Golden State defense as a whole, came in the second quarter, when Brown drove from the left wing late in the shot clock. Brown has spent key stretches of the postseason rescuing doomed possessions, but here he ran into quicksand. First Green shot a right hand into Brown’s dribble, forcing him to pick up the ball. Then, while Brown pivoted in search of an outlet, Green mirrored the moves, eating up more airspace with each one. The last-ditch fadeaway fell well short and said enough; Green didn’t have to celebrate it.
The A-plot from Sunday’s game was the Warriors simplifying their offensive approach and letting Stephen Curry pick at the relative weak points in a forbidding Celtics defense. But the win — and the Warriors’ resuscitated hopes in the series — owed as much to Golden State rediscovering a defense capable of gumming up Boston’s attack. As the Warriors scrapped their zone and slotted Green mostly onto Brown — instead of Al Horford, where he had spent most of the first contest — the Celtics’ numbers plummeted: a 62.9 effective field-goal percentage in Game 1 dropped to 43.5 in Game 2, per Cleaning the Glass. Closer examination shows that even that mark was propped up by Jayson Tatum’s hot shooting from distance; excluding garbage time, the Celtics made 44.4 percent of their threes but just 25 percent of their midrange shots and 33.3 percent of their attempts at the rim — that last mark the lowest of any team this postseason.
Pre-Finals hype cycles require the sorting of teams into camps — the more discrete the better, for promo purposes — but the idea that this series would come down to the point-piling Warriors versus the prohibitive Celtics was always too tidy by half. Though Boston was the NBA’s stingiest team over the regular season, Golden State finished second in defensive rating, a mere four-tenths of a point back of first place.
Like the Celtics, the Warriors have a battalion of rangy perimeter dudes — the spring-tendoned Andrew Wiggins, the born-for-this Gary Payton II — orbiting a generational stopper. Also like the Celtics, they have the corporate knowledge it takes to knit individual skill sets into a cohesive system. Before washing up in the Bay, Wiggins hadn’t been called a defensive plus since his pre-draft profiles, and Payton had previously failed to catch on with five NBA clubs. Now, Wiggins has become a reliable, switch-adept cog (Golden State’s defense improved by 1.4 points per 100…