Draymond Green dealt with a lot during the Warriors’ Game 2 loss to the Minnesota Timberwolves on Thursday night at Target Center.
After picking up a technical foul in the first half and facing racist taunts from a fan during the fourth quarter, Green issued a short, impassioned statement to a few media members in the locker room before leaving.
But with an important Game 3 set for Saturday night at Chase Center, Warriors coach Steve Kerr is confident the 35-year-old forward will be fine when the players take the court.
“I don’t think it will impact the game,” Kerr told reporters on a conference call Friday afternoon. “I wasn’t aware of what happened, in terms of the fan, like the insults, until I read about it this morning. I talked to him about that and we did talk about the technical counts and just the whole set of circumstances, but I know Draymond well. He’s going to be ready to go tomorrow. He’s going to play a great game.
“He understands where we are in the series and we have this great opportunity. It’s 1-1 and we’ve got home-court advantage. We got our home crowd tomorrow. So he’s excited. I’m excited and we moved past all that stuff.”
Green’s technical foul for hitting Timberwolves center Naz Reid in the head is his fifth infraction in nine games this postseason. Two more and Green faces a one-game suspension.
Long after the outcome of the game had been decided, Green, who played 29 minutes in the 117-93 loss, was riding a stationary bike near the tunnel when he appeared to be taunted by a fan sitting nearby.
The Timberwolves issued a statement Friday morning, which Kerr commended.
“The only thing I can say is that the Timberwolves handled it perfectly,” Kerr said Friday. “For their security to be on it and remove the fan. Obviously, that stuff is ugly and unacceptable. And so we want to thank the Timberwolves organization for handling it as well as they possibly could. I just think that things like this happen occasionally.
“Happened to me a couple of times as a player. Fans crossing the line, yelling stuff at you. It’s painful. I can’t sit here and claim to know what it would be like to be in Draymond’s shoes as a Black man, to hear racially insensitive comments like that.
“But I’ve heard my share of stuff that’s really painful and hurtful and it’s not ideal, but you always want the support of the security and the crowd, the home crowd, and like I said, the Wolves handled that beautifully and Draymond is handling it really well.”
But Kerr wanted to make it clear that one fan doesn’t represent an entire fanbase or city.
“It’s unacceptable for any fan to do that to a player,” Kerr said. “When you say it’s unacceptable, there has to be action that goes with that term, and that’s exactly what the Timberwolves did. Security immediately ejected the fan, so we are really grateful for the way that the T-Wolves handled the situation.
“I know that ‘Minnesota Nice’ is a phrase to describe Minnesotans and I found that to be 100 percent true. The last few days, every single person I ran into was so kind and everybody was saying the same thing like ‘I’m pulling for the T-Wolves, but you guys are always welcome in our city.’ It’s a real thing, the hospitality in Minneapolis, in Minnesota.
“So I never take words from one person and label a city with that. There’s just going to be people, individuals, sometimes they’re drunk, whatever, who cross the line and it’s unfortunate but it doesn’t at all impact my view of the city of Minneapolis.”
Kerr has been open about how, when he played college basketball at Arizona, fans taunted him regarding the murder of his dad, Malcolm, in a terrorist attack in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1984.
So, while Kerr might be the right person to ask if fans hurling racial or other insensitive taunts should be banned from attending future NBA games, he doesn’t want that weight on his shoulders.
“It’s a good question,” Kerr told reporters. “I kind of leave that up to the league to decide. They have their protocols, their rules, But these ugly incidents are … I don’t think they’re common but they do happen occasionally and I mentioned earlier, they happened to me when I was in college. Not racial taunts, but taunts about my father, who had been killed in a terrorist act a year earlier or so. That was the most shocking moment of my entire playing career to hear somebody saying something like that, that was so personally hurtful and painful and intentionally trying to hurt me.
“And so, I empathize with every athlete, whether it’s Draymond last night getting taunted about racial taunts, whether it’s really anything. It seems like a few times a year, you read about situations like this. I think Russell Westbrook, in Utah a few years ago, had to go through something like that, and it’s unfortunate but like I said, I believe most of these incidents are pretty isolated and it’s really important that people handle them the right way and the Timberwolves absolutely handled it the right way.”
Kerr understands what Green is going through, but he fully expects his star forward to bring his best self in a game the Warriors need to win Saturday night.
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