Draymond Green upset with referee over technical foul call
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Draymond Green is upset with a referee over a technical foul call.
Green was called for a tech in the second quarter of his Golden State Warriors’ 99-82 loss to the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday night. He saw plenty of contact on a layup attempt by Steph Curry and was upset over the lack of a call.
Green immediately ran up to an official and started making his case. He continued to talk Marat Kogut’s ear off.
Draymond Green with a lengthy response on his Tech and refs in general tonight:
"I'm a grown man with my own children, so I won't be treated as someone else's child."
This particular one he was upset at a no-call on a Steph lay-up pic.twitter.com/LSWBUyBMMX
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Green talked after the loss and was incredulous over the tech, his 8th of the season.
“I got a technical for a referee walking away from me and then coming back to talk to me and I walk away,” Green said after the game. “That’s why I got a technical. I think I got eight or nine techs this year. Five or six of them are super questionable. And as I said to the ref, ‘It’s unbelievable that you’ll walk away from me, very disrespectful, mid-sentence when we’re having a normal conversation and if I walked away from you when you were talking to me, you’d give me a tech.’ He continued to walk away from me, then walked up to me and said ‘All right, what do you have to say?’ And I said ‘f–k it. It’s cool. I don’t even want to talk no more. It’s all right’ and walked away and got a tech. So, you tell me where the tech is at.”
Green thinks what the official did was disrespectful, but what he did is actually disrespectful. He talked the official’s ear off instead of focusing on the game. Then when the official decided to listen to Green, Green disrespected him by cursing in front of him. What kind of way to show appreciation is that?
Draymond apparently wants conversations with referees to become like the way players have made things with fans where they can have them ejected if they don’t like what the fans are saying. Green appears to want referees to stop games, sit down and have arbitration hearings regarding calls he doesn’t like, and for refs who don’t listen to him to be replaced by ones who do. He lamented that referees have some power and don’t have to capitulate to him.
“But this ain’t the same world we used to live in and you can’t treat people like that. So that’s bulls–t because if I walk away, I get a tech, if I walk to you, I get a tech, have a normal conversation with you, I get a tech. I’m not going to stop talking. So I don’t know if the tech is supposed to stop me from talking. I’m not going to stop talking and I shouldn’t have to stop talking if I come to you and have a respectful conversation with you. I’m a grown man with my own children, so I won’t be treated as someone else’s child, that probably doesn’t even have as many children as I have. It’s garbage. Like I said, there’s been quite a few of them this year. And I don’t really make any noise about it because at this point in my career, I don’t really care about getting a tech. So it kind of is what it is, but it is a shame and that’s for certain.”
Green is in his 10th NBA season and still hasn’t figured out that the more he yaps at officials and confronts them over calls, the more prone he will be to getting techs. He thinks he’s having conversations, but what he’s really doing is badgering officials at times and trying to influence calls. Officials who are trying to be neutral and fair are not going to like that. That shouldn’t be hard to figure out. And referees not calling things the way Draymond likes doesn’t make him a victim.
Photo: Darren Yamashita-USA TODAY Sports