Draymond Green didn’t light up the scoreboard Tuesday night against the Los Angeles Lakers, and that was kind of the point.
For Golden State, the question around Green this season isn’t whether he can go out and carry an offense. It’s whether he can settle into a new role inside Steve Kerr’s tweaked system and still be the kind of player this team can lean on. Against the Lakers, he offered a clean little snapshot of what that looks like.
Green finished with three points and took just one shot from the field, a perimeter look he knocked down early in the first quarter. More importantly, he kept the offense moving.
In under 15 minutes, he handed out eight assists and committed only two turnovers. That’s the kind of low-drama, high-IQ work Golden State needs from him as the season unfolds.
That matters because last year was rough on the offensive end. With a lot of his teammates sidelined late in the season, Green was pushed into a more primary scoring role than he probably wanted at this stage of his career.
The results weren’t pretty: 8.4 points per game on 41.8% shooting across 68 games. The efficiency dipped, and at times the offense stalled when he was asked to do too much.
This season is supposed to be different. Kerr has reworked the offense around more five-out spacing, more perimeter shooting, and a second off-ball connector in Green to help everything click. That puts the spotlight on a very different version of him - not as a creator who has to force the action, but as a stabilizer who keeps possessions humming and punishes defenses when they ignore him.
The other layer here is contractual. Green is on an expiring $27.7 million deal, which makes him movable if Golden State decides that’s the best route before the deadline.
So this isn’t just about fit. It’s about proving he still has a real place in the organization that drafted him nearly 15 years ago.
Defensively, Green remains one of the smartest players in the league, but age changes the equation. Frank Vogel, brought in this offseason as Kerr’s lead assistant to reshape the Warriors’ defense, usually leans on aggressive perimeter pressure with a roaming rim protector behind it. Green can still read the game at a high level, but he’s no longer built to handle that kind of anchor role full-time.
The Warriors may still have to ask him to do some of it, too, depending on Kristaps Porzingis’s status for the start of the season, which remains very much up in the air.
Still, the bigger story for Green is on offense. With Yaxel Lendeborg giving Golden State another floor-spacing option and a real scoring presence, Green’s job may simply be to make the right read, move the ball, and knock down open threes when defenses give them to him.
Tuesday night was a good step in that direction. It didn’t answer every question, especially about whether Green can keep that shooting touch steady or embrace a smaller role over a full season.
But it did show the Warriors a version of him that fits. And right now, that’s exactly what they need.
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It is a familiar kind of Warriors crossroads: protect the future while managing the present. With concerns already lingering around the health of Draymond Green, Stephen Curry, Jimmy Butler and Kristaps Porzingis, the urgency goes beyond one negotiation, even if Podziemski's situation may resolve soon. How Golden State handles that conversation will say plenty about where the front office thinks this team is headed. [Read more 🡒]