Draymond Green may have his own problems to sort out, but that doesn’t mean he’s in the mood to hear from Stephen A. Smith.
The First Take star, who was confronted by LeBron James earlier this week, revealed that he and Green are no longer on speaking terms. While the tension between the two is apparent, the root of the issue is something much bigger —Bronny James.
That’s what prompted LeBron to confront Smith courtside during Thursday night’s Los Angeles Lakers-New York Knicks game. The Lakers star clearly wants Smith to stop involving his eldest son in his commentary. This comes after Smith previously claimed that LeBron’s camp reached out to him over criticism of Bronny, only to hit back, calling LeBron’s sensitivity “beyond the pale.”
It turns out that Green is also sensitive to how Smith talks about Bronny.
“As a matter of fact, I heard that not many, not all, but a few players were upset with me about that,” Smith revealed on his The Stephen A. Smith Show. “I think one player, in particular, was Draymond Green, who I haven’t spoken to since and has no desire to speak to me, primarily because of this, I suppose.”
Smith also previously “crushed” Green with one of his many takes, but that’s not the only time he’s targeted the Golden State Warriors forward. After Green’s last suspension, Smith directly questioned his future in the media world, even going as far as to say Green’s behavior might hurt his chances of succeeding Charles Barkley. Green did this again this week, but that’s a different conversation.
“When I think about somebody like Draymond Green, and I’ve kept my mouth shut about this for a while, but without getting into too many details, Draymond Green has felt the need to go to other people to say how he feels about me,” Smith later explained. “And, I got mad love for Draymond. Draymond is a good brother that, quite frankly, I’ve always tried to be good to. And this shift in his feelings about me — I got it.
“But I’m gonna get to a bigger level. You see, one of the reasons that I had so many great relationships in the world of sports over the years is because if cats had a problem, they called me. Silly me, I’m thinking that if you get along with people and you talk with them, if they have an issue with you, at least they’d call you and confront you man-to-man before something’s resolved.”
Smith is talking about Green here; he’s not talking about LeBron.
“The reason I’m not talking about LeBron is because, excuse my language, LeBron and I don’t really f*ck with each other,” Smith says. “It’s primarily been ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ for more than a decade — and I’m fine with it, and so is he, OK? But that wasn’t the relationship with me and Draymond. That wasn’t the relationship with me and quite a few cats. And one of the biggest reasons that I loved the kind of relationship that we had, is that I always got the impression, ‘Yo, if they got an issue with you, they’ll call you.’ You talk it out as men and if you disagree, you part ways, even if you part ways not speaking with one another, or you can be agreeable, or you can agree to disagree.
“It could be a boatload of things, but the blindsightedness of it all is what throws me off. You see, if I got a problem with somebody, I’m not hard to find. You call me; I’m gonna pick up the phone. You want to see me? I’m rap to you, and we can hash it out, and we can reach a resolution, or we don’t. That’s not what’s happening. And so, it is what it is, you know?”
And judging by Smith’s diatribe, it seems he and Green have reached a point where “it is what it is” amounts to a broken connection that no amount of back-and-forth can fix, at least not without a phone call to set things straight.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.