Say what you want about Draymond Green, but there’s no denying that he’s one of the smartest basketball players in the NBA. Green was the glue that held those championship-winning Golden State Warriors teams together, not only with his outstanding defense but with his playmaking on offense. As he told Penny Hardaway on Two Cents though, it wasn’t always easy.
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Since he played with Stephen Curry and Klay Thompson, Green started to notice that teams were willing to let him shoot the ball, just so the Splash Brothers wouldn’t. At first, he recalled how the lack of defensive coverage would throw him off. But as time progressed, Green’s high basketball IQ got in his own way.
He started to think about the amount of freedom he was offered meant that teams didn’t think he was as deadly from beyond the arc. He recalled to Hardaway,
“When it first initially started happening it threw me off, because you’ve never seen someone just sit back. And so for me, here’s where having the [basketball] IQ that I have also can sometimes be a curse. Because I think the game so much that in my mind I’m like, ‘Well if they’re trying to force me to take this shot, then I probably shouldn’t take this shot, because they wouldn’t be forcing me to take a shot that’s best for us.'”
He claimed that the amount of freedom he got on shots led him to second-guess his own ability, and said he lost confidence in his own shot-making.
“And so then I kind of went through this thing of like, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t shoot,’ and I lost my confidence and I lost my belief in myself.”
Green detailed how he had to overcome that mental hurdle to get back to being the player he knew he could be, and as he said, “The mental hurdle in most cases is tougher than the physical.” NBA players aren’t always comfortable being vulnerable, and Green talked about how he was not only scared to shoot, he was scared to share his self-doubt with his teammates.
Draymond Green used his IQ to overcome his struggles
You can either let your fear consume you, or drive you to greatness, and Green chose the latter.
“I started figuring out ways to make them pay for playing me like that, that wasn’t necessarily me shooting.” Green treated the game like a chess match, so if the defense laid off him, he’d run a dribble handoff to Steph for an open three. Once the defense adjusted and got up on him to shut that down, Green would fake it and go to the hoop for an easy layup.
People saw this and lauded Green for being such a smart player, but Green says, “The reality is, it was a brilliant cover-up for being scared as hell to shoot the basketball and losing all my confidence in myself.”
Green even met with a sports psychologist, and he also worked on things like shooting after hesitating, which allowed him to get his confidence back. Seeing as how Draymond Green has been a foundational piece of four NBA titles, we’d say it worked out pretty well for him.
