Warriors Have No Choice but to Max Out Draymond Green in 2015 NBA Free Agency
It's hard to remember when it happened, but at some point during Draymond Green's breakout year—amid the floor burns, buried threes and vice-grip rebounds—a growing fear gripped fans of the Golden State Warriors.
It was a fear that other teams would notice just how valuable Green had become, that they'd toss him a maximum contract offer when he hit free agency in the summer of 2015, stealing him away from a squad his efforts helped forge.
Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports reported in February that Green's hometown Detroit Pistons were in the mix. Maybe the Warriors, which had never paid the luxury tax before and hadn't quite seen enough of Green to be sure he was worth plunging into that fiscally punitive territory, would balk at matching. And maybe that would result in the departure of a crowd favorite and a key cog on both ends whose value is increasingly hard to overstate.
A funny thing happened during Green's breakout year, though: It turned into something more.
At some point, it stopped being a breakout and morphed into a full-on blowup. Green proved himself to be a new-age superstar, and his explosion erased any fears that the Warriors would ever let a player like him get away.
"Unless Warriors execs are misleading me, they are prepared to match any offer Green gets, no matter the number," Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News reported in February.
Because Green became so good and so critical to everything Golden Sate did during its 67-win destruction of a loaded Western Conference, the very idea of allowing him to leave became a nonstarter.
Outside circumstances helped.
Because the salary cap is slated to rise substantially in each of the next three seasons, Golden State can match a max offer for Green (which would start at approximately $15 million per year, 25 percent of the 2015 salary cap of $63 million, per Larry Coon's CBA FAQ) or give him a five-year max outright with the knowledge that it will only have to pay the tax for a year before the cap rises and the team falls back beneath the threshold.
And if the Warriors go on to win a championship this year, it'll be hard to imagine them letting a few million dollars get in the way of bringing back such a vital piece of a title core.
There are more important players on the Warriors roster—one, to be exact. And he just collected the MVP award.
Beyond Stephen Curry, Green is the player Golden State can least afford to lose.
Green averaged 11.7 points, 8.2 rebounds, 3.7 assists and 1.4 made triples per game during the 2014-15 season, which put him in an exclusive group this year. Nobody else in the league had the versatility to match those averages, per Basketball-Reference.com.
He defended five positions routinely in the Warriors' switch-happy scheme, stymieing post-ups down low and hounding ball-handlers on the perimeter with equal effectiveness. As the season progressed, his reputation as a stopper grew.
"There've been numerous guys that say their strengths are the post game, but they don't want to post him up," teammate Andrew Bogut, who knows a thing or two about great defense, said, per The Associated Press (via USA Today). "They end up floating to the perimeter, or vice versa, because he's just annoying defensively."
Green stretched the floor with threes, pushed the ball on the break and set the intense tone that powered the Warriors to more wins than they'd ever logged in a single year.
You can give Curry the lion's share of the credit for Golden State's success, but don't overlook where the MVP focused his attention during his acceptance speech, per Kawakami:
Even if we pretend Green's not worth huge dollars, the Warriors have no choice but to keep a guy Curry obviously loves, especially with the MVP set to hit free agency in 2017.
The playoffs have only made Green's value (and the certainty that the Warriors appreciate it) more obvious. He restrained Anthony Davis in the first round, then put the Memphis Grizzlies in an immediate Game 1 hole with three first-quarter threes.
They never climbed out of that hole, and teams rarely do. The Warriors won 17 of the 19 games in which Green hit at least three treys during the regular season.
Head coach Steve Kerr called him the team's "heart and soul," per Diamond Leung of the San Jose Mercury News.
Shaun Livingston used the same term, per CSN Bay Area.
Voters across the NBA media landscape spoke with their ballots, giving Green more first-place nods for Defensive Player of the Year than the man who took home the award, Kawhi Leonard.
Throw all that together, and it's clear that Warriors fans will call Green one of their own for years to come.
The fear that cropped up earlier in the season was born of uncertainty—about Green's value, about the Warriors' perception of that value and about how the organization would handle a seemingly complicated financial decision.
There is no more uncertainty now. And there is no more fear.
Green's performance this year and in these playoffs has created only one possible outcome, and it is now beyond certain: The Warriors won't let him go anywhere.
Grant Hughes covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @gt_hughes.
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