Time for a brief advice column. Let's say you have learned that a colleague missed a work event to attend a funeral for a loved one. It's perfectly appropriate to say the following, as one Golden State Warriors player did at a postgame press conference Thursday night:
"I send my well wishes to him and his family. It's inevitable, we all experience death in one way or another, and we'll all experience it in the same way one day. So it's unfortunate, and you never wish that on anybody."
What you must not do, under any circumstances, is immediately follow that up with this sentence:
"But The Draymond Green Show with Baron Davis must go on."
Do not say this. Re-engineer your whole life in such a way that nothing like this can ever occur again. Strip everything down to the bolts—and then remove the bolts, too, and start afresh.
There's some context for why Draymond Green followed up condolences with a status update on his donkey podcast, and it only makes him look worse. On Tuesday the Warriors beat the New York Knicks, who were missing big man Karl-Anthony Towns. Afterward on his podcast, a safe space to bray unchecked into a microphone several times a week, Green shared his own theory for Towns's absence: He was afraid of former teammate Jimmy Butler.
"Some would say [Towns] didn't play because Jimmy [Butler] was in the building. I saw KAT's pops yesterday at the game, and it's always love, I got mad love for the OG. His pops is an incredible man. But yeah, they said KAT ain't play because Jimmy came into town. And you know him and Jimmy had the infamous practice in Minnesota ... I don't know what was hurt. I didn't look that deep into it to figure out what his injury was."
It turned out that Towns did not miss the game because he was hung up on that "infamous practice in Minnesota" from 2018. He has played Butler several times since, and as recently as last October, when he scored 44 in a Knicks win over the Miami Heat. Towns actually missed Tuesday's game because of the death of a family friend. "This is one of those moments where I had to be there for my family and be there for the kids that lost somebody really special to them," he told reporters on Wednesday.
(Green's team has since scrubbed the Towns rumor from the podcast episode with an inelegant cut.)
In 2022, Green railed against traditional media, agitating for an approach he called "new media," epitomized by player-led podcasts, like the one he'd started a few months earlier. "Be very critical, but tell us the whole truth," he said at the time. "I think that's been lost, and what's replaced it is titles and headlines and hot takes for clickbait." This was about mutual protection, of course. "The new media, we protect guys. This isn't about tearing people down," said a man who was just a month out from punching his sophomore teammate and expressing no remorse.
A reporter presented the inconvenient KAT facts to Green in a press conference Thursday night after the Warriors' win over the Nets. He tried to keep it moving: "Oh man, that's unfortunate, I'm sorry to hear that. That sucks. But my comments that I made, was 'what I heard, was this,' and that's what I heard." Refusing to apologize for spreading stupid conjecture on a podcast, ignoring its tragic context, and even smiling through the non-apology? That's the model for any successful American in 2025.
