Draymond Green has been talking trash all offseason and he shows no signs of stopping whatsoever. Green has been engaging in some nasty back and forths with television personalities like Skip Bayless and he has also gone after Kendrick Perkins.
So, for once it was nice to see him in a more relaxed space while working in collaboration with JJ Redick who also has his own podcast and their collab produced some quality discussions. Unsurprisingly, the topic of Kevin Durant came up after all the talk about the Warriors winning this latest title without him. Draymond claimed that the Warriors needed Durant back then as they wouldn’t have won another title without him as teams were figuring them out. When Redick asked him if they could have beaten the Rockets without KD, Draymond threw some shade at them by saying that team was never going to beat them.
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“Yeah, we was beating them for sure. That team was never going to beat us. It just was not going to happen.”
While the response left everyone in splits, in reality, no team got closer to beating a healthy Warriors team with Durant than those Rockets did. They had taken a 3-2 lead in the 2018 Western Conference Finals over the Warriors, but Chris Paul would injure his hamstring in their Game 5 win. With Paul missing Games 6 and 7, the Rockets just couldn’t hang with the Warriors as they lost both games
We’ll never know how differently things might have panned out if Paul was healthy for those two games but Draymond at least claims they wouldn’t have stood a chance regardless. The Warriors would go on to sweep the Cavaliers in the Finals that year in what was their last championship before their triumph in 2022.
