Everything evened out in the NBA Finals between the Golden State and Boston. Before game 3, the Celtics know around the German Daniel Theis that they must not allow the mind games of Warriors star Draymond Green.
Many NBA pundits feel that Draymond Green plays the most important role in the Golden State Warriors’ success because they built a system around him. He’s not the best player on the team, but he’s perhaps the most important.
While Draymond Green didn’t make the all-defensive first team this year and slipped to the all-defensive second team, where he joined Bam Adebayo (Miami) and Robert Williams (Boston) on the frontcourt position, he still played a standout defensive season.
Arguably more important than his defense, especially in the playoffs, is Green’s ability to get into the minds of his opponents.
Trash talk, provocations, cunning fouls at just the right time – Draymond enjoys disrupting the flow of the opposing team’s game and was very successful in doing so in the Warriors’ victory in Game 2 of the NBA Finals against Boston.
During the pre-Game 3 media round, I asked Daniel Theis if Green will seek some hostility, which Boston fans will definitely show him even more, and if unlike Game 2, the Celtics will be able to keep their cool.
Theis: “I think he’ll get his energy from the hall and the fans, but we just can’t get involved with it. And game 2? That was his whole goal, just do stuff with everything and everyone and just take us out and he did that in that moment.”
Theis continues: “We know that he pays attention and that his goal is to tempt someone to commit a technical foul, to take him out of the game completely. But we just can’t get involved and let him do it.”
By Len Werle
The original of this post “”He wants to get into the heads!” The perfidious psychological tactics of Warriors star Draymond Green” comes from OpenCourt-Basketball.
