Draymond Green

Published April 19, 2026 · By The Basketball Fans Editors

Full name

Draymond Jamal Green

Born

1990-03-04, Saginaw, Michigan

Nationality

American

Height

6′6″ (198 cm)

Position

Power forward / Center

Teams

Golden State Warriors

Draymond Green is the most argued-about player of the modern Warriors dynasty. He is a four-time NBA champion, the 2017 Defensive Player of the Year, the player whose Game 5 suspension in the 2016 Finals helped cost Golden State a 3-1 lead and the title, the player who punched Jordan Poole at a training-camp practice in October 2022, the player who put Rudy Gobert in a chokehold in November 2023 and slapped Jusuf Nurkić in the face four weeks later, and the player whose podcast and locker-room voice have shaped the Warriors’ identity for the better part of a decade. He was the 35th overall pick of the 2012 NBA Draft. He is, in 2026, in his fourteenth season with Golden State, still the team’s defensive anchor, still the loudest voice in the building, still on the floor for every closing minute Stephen Curry plays.

Saginaw

He was born March 4, 1990 in Saginaw, Michigan, an industrial city of about 50,000 in the central Lower Peninsula whose population had declined every year of his life because of the auto-supply contraction. His mother, Mary Babers-Green, played college basketball at Saginaw Valley State and coached him at Reese Public School and later from the bleachers at Saginaw High. His father, Wallace Davis, was a Saginaw native who worked at General Motors. His older half-brother Torrian Harris also played basketball.

Mary was the dominant presence in his childhood. He has said in multiple interviews, including a 2017 Lee Jenkins Sports Illustrated feature and a 2023 episode of his own podcast, that almost every basketball decision he made before age 22 had her fingerprints on it. She drove him to AAU tournaments through Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland. She watched his games from the front row and yelled critiques across the gym in real time. He has said she remains his hardest critic and the single basketball voice he trusts most.

He attended Saginaw High School and won the Michigan Class A state championship in 2008 as a senior, averaging 25 points and 13 rebounds. Tom Izzo, the Michigan State head coach, recruited him personally. Green committed to MSU over Kentucky and Connecticut.

Michigan State

Tom Izzo’s program is the Pat Riley franchise of college basketball: physical, defensive, oriented around rebounding and toughness as identity. Draymond fit it exactly. He played four years at Michigan State (2008-2012), reaching two NCAA Final Fours (2009, 2010), winning two Big Ten titles, and graduating with a degree in communications.

His senior year in 2011-12 he was the Big Ten Player of the Year, a consensus first-team All-American, and a finalist for both the Wooden and the Naismith Awards. He averaged 16.2 points, 10.6 rebounds, 3.8 assists, and 1.5 steals per game. He recorded nine triple-doubles in his college career, the second-most in NCAA Division I history behind only Kyle Collinsworth at BYU.

The 2012 NBA Draft did not value him. Scouts wrote in their pre-draft reports that he was “an undersized power forward without a true position” and “lacks the lateral quickness to defend wings or the size to defend centers.” He fell out of the first round. Golden State took him 35th overall, the fifth pick of the second round, on June 28, 2012.

Mark Jackson, Steve Kerr, and the small-ball center

He spent his rookie year as a deep-bench reserve under Mark Jackson, averaging 2.9 points in 13 minutes a game. The breakthrough came in his second year, 2013-14, when he started 12 games and posted his first career triple-double. The breakthrough that defined his career came in 2014-15, the first season of head coach Steve Kerr.

The 2014-15 Warriors had a problem. Their starting power forward, David Lee, was the highest-paid player on the roster at $15 million but did not fit Kerr’s stretch-the-floor offense. Lee suffered a hamstring injury in the preseason. Draymond, then 24, started the regular-season opener at power forward and never came out. By midseason he had become the small-ball center on the unit Kerr called the “Death Lineup”: Curry, Klay Thompson, Andre Iguodala, Harrison Barnes, and Draymond at the five. The Warriors went 67-15. They beat LeBron James and the Cavaliers in six to win the franchise’s first championship since 1975. Iguodala won Finals MVP. Draymond was the rotational anchor.

He averaged 11.7 points, 8.2 rebounds, and 3.7 assists in the regular season. He was the unit’s defensive captain, switching every screen, communicating every rotation, and finishing in transition. The Death Lineup outscored opponents by 45 points per 100 possessions in 101 regular-season minutes, one of the best small-sample five-man lineups in NBA history.

2016: 73 wins, the Finals, and the suspension

The 2015-16 Warriors finished 73-9, the best regular season in NBA history. Draymond made his first All-Star team, averaged 14, 9.5 rebounds, and 7.4 assists, and finished seventh in MVP voting. He was first-team All-Defense.

Game 4 of the 2016 NBA Finals at Cleveland: tied series, third quarter, Warriors clinging to a one-point lead. LeBron James stepped over Draymond after a fall. Draymond, prone on his back, swiped at LeBron’s groin with his right arm. The play went uncalled. The next morning the league’s review office added a flagrant 1 to Draymond’s accumulated playoff penalty count, putting him over the threshold. He was suspended for Game 5.

Curry and Klay played Game 5 at Oracle Arena without him. The Cavs won 112-97. They won Game 6 at Cleveland 115-101. They won Game 7 at Oracle 93-89, completing the only 3-1 NBA Finals comeback. The Warriors lost the championship.

Draymond has said in multiple interviews, including the 2017 Sports Illustrated Lee Jenkins feature and a 2023 episode of his own podcast, that the Game 5 suspension is the most painful moment of his career. Two months later Kevin Durant signed with Golden State.

2017 DPOY and three more rings

The 2016-17 season was the high point. The Warriors went 67-15. Draymond won Defensive Player of the Year, the first non-center to win since Gary Payton in 1996. He averaged 10 points, 7.9 rebounds, 7 assists, 2 steals, and 1.4 blocks. He was second-team All-NBA. The Warriors went 16-1 in the playoffs and beat the Cavs in five in the Finals. Durant won Finals MVP.

The 2017-18 Warriors swept Cleveland 4-0. Draymond posted a triple-double in Game 1 (10 points, 12 rebounds, 12 assists), the famous Tristan Thompson and JR Smith timeout-confusion overtime game. The 2018-19 Warriors lost in the Finals to Toronto in six (Klay’s torn ACL game; Durant’s torn Achilles in Game 5).

Then came the long valley. Durant left for Brooklyn. Klay was out for two seasons. The 2019-20 Warriors finished 15-50. Draymond signed a four-year, $100 million extension in August 2019 anyway. The 2020-21 Warriors finished 39-33 and lost the play-in.

The 2022 championship

The 2021-22 Warriors finished 53-29 and won the title with Klay back from the 941 days, Curry as Finals MVP, and Draymond as the defensive captain again. They beat Memphis in the second round in six and Boston in the Finals in six. Draymond averaged 5.8 points in the playoffs. The 2022 ring is the answer he points to in podcast interviews when asked whether the second-act core was as good as the original. His view: it was the same core (Curry, Klay, Draymond) plus a younger supporting cast. The first-act core needed Iguodala, Bogut, and Barnes. The 2022 group did it without them.

October 5, 2022: the Jordan Poole punch

A leaked TMZ video on October 7, 2022 showed Draymond walking up to Jordan Poole at a closed practice and punching him in the face. Poole had said something to him; the video does not capture the exchange. Draymond was fined an undisclosed amount and missed several preseason games. The team kept it internal, but the dynamic with Poole did not recover. Poole was traded to Washington in the summer of 2023 for Chris Paul. Draymond apologized publicly that fall and again on his own podcast in 2023.

The Gobert and Nurkić incidents (2023-24)

The 2023-24 season was the most chaotic of his career. On November 14, 2023, in a game against the Minnesota Timberwolves, he wrapped his right arm around Rudy Gobert’s neck for ten seconds in a scrum and was assessed a flagrant 2 ejection. The league suspended him five games. On December 12, 2023, against the Phoenix Suns, he wound up and slapped Jusuf Nurkić in the face on a turnaround. Adam Silver suspended him indefinitely and required him to undergo league-mandated counseling before being reinstated. He missed 12 games. He returned January 8, 2024. He has not been suspended since.

He has talked about the Nurkić incident at length on his own podcast and in a March 2024 sit-down with Stephen A. Smith on First Take. His framing is the same in both: by the December 2023 incident, he had become a player whose anger was running ahead of his mind. The counseling, he says, was the first time in his career he had been forced to look at it.

The podcast and the second career

He launched The Draymond Green Show on Colin Cowherd’s Volume Sports network in October 2022. By 2024 it was the most-listened-to NBA player podcast and one of the most-cited single sources for in-season insider commentary. He has used it to break news on his own incidents (the Poole punch context), to push back on media narratives about Curry, and to interview every active head coach, GM, and superstar on the calendar. The podcast is, as Marcus Thompson II wrote in a 2024 Athletic feature on Draymond’s media career, the second-most-influential thing he has built in basketball after his on-court IQ.

2026

Draymond at 36 is still the Warriors’ starting power forward and the on-court coach. The 2025-26 Warriors entered the season with Curry, Draymond, Jimmy Butler (acquired in the February 2025 trade from Miami), and a young core that includes Brandin Podziemski and Jonathan Kuminga. Draymond averaged 9.2 points, 6.5 rebounds, and 6.2 assists per game through April 2026. He remains the only player in NBA history to win Defensive Player of the Year in a season he averaged fewer than 11 points per game.

Career résumé

Four NBA championships (2015, 2017, 2018, 2022). One Defensive Player of the Year (2017). Four All-Star selections. Two All-NBA Second Team selections. Six All-Defensive Team selections. The 35th overall pick of the 2012 draft is, by every standard analytics measure, one of the four or five best picks in the second round of the modern era. He will be a first-ballot Hall of Famer when the eligibility window opens after he retires (his current contract runs through the 2027-28 season).

The Warriors retire numbers sparingly. Curry’s 30 will hang first. Klay’s 11 will follow. Draymond’s 23 will follow them. The order is roughly the order their championship teams were built around.

Gear

Shop official Draymond Green jerseys and fan gear on Fanatics, or pick up Marcus Thompson II’s Golden for the Warriors dynasty.

Shop Draymond Green gear on Fanatics →

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Sources

• Basketball-Reference: Draymond Green.
• Sports Illustrated, Lee Jenkins, “Heart of the Warriors” (February 2017).
• The Athletic, Marcus Thompson II, “Draymond Green’s media career and the second-act Warriors” (April 2024).
• ESPN, Adrian Wojnarowski and Tim Bontemps, coverage of the November 14 and December 12, 2023 suspensions.
• The Draymond Green Show, Volume Sports network (selected 2023 episodes on the 2016 Finals Game 5 suspension and the Poole incident).