Draymond Green Says He and KD Have Moved On Since Their Altercation in November

As the Golden State Warriors try to navigate the beginning of the NBA Finals without star Kevin Durant, team leader Draymond Green acknowledged that his role within the framework of the team is dramatically different without Durant on the floor.

“It completely changes,” Green told ESPN’s Rachel Nichols in an interview that will run Thursday on The Jump. “I have to be more of a scoring threat when Kevin’s not out there. I have to — I really try to push the pace more when he’s not out there. When Kevin’s out there, we all have the luxury of just saying, ‘OK, that set didn’t work, we still got this guy to just throw a ball into it and get out of the way.’ That luxury isn’t there anymore, and also I think with Kevin being out, we’re trying to make up 37 points again.”

“We’re not going to make those 37 points again up just by walking the ball up the floor and thinking we’re going to have the same trust running the set as if Kevin is on the floor,” Green said. “So how do you make up those points? Get extra possessions, get the pace to where you want it to be, get some easy buckets. That’s how you make it up.”

In Durant’s absence, Green is playing arguably the best basketball of his career.

Green reiterated that he and Durant have moved on from their verbal altercation in November at the end of an overtime loss to the LA Clippers at Staples Center.

“I think I just have looked at it from a different perspective,” Green said. “It wasn’t necessarily that him being a free agent bothered [me]. We all go through that in this profession. It was more so the fact of, ‘Are you with us or not?’ That bothered me. But what I’ll say is, after I had that moment, one thing Kevin told me is, ‘Dude, you have to block out all of that. You see me coming here and work every day. You see me give my all to this team. You see everything, every second of every day. The media is gonna say what they want, but you see everything, you know I’m here, you know I’m with you.’

“And it allowed me to focus on that. It allowed me to focus on what I see, what I can control and not what I can’t see per se and what I can’t control. And so I think that was just the point for me of where I had to look at it from a different standpoint. I had to stop listening to all the noise.”