But sometimes, that pride, which is more than justified for a player of his defensive caliber, leads to him getting frustrated with his teammates, especially when it comes to help defense.
After the win against the Milwaukee Bucks, Jimmy Butler lauded Green’s defensive effort against Giannis Antetokoumpo. In his postgame interview, he mentioned how Green takes pride in every matchup he’s presented with.
“He’s locked in. He never wants you to ‘help.’ Sometimes he does get beat, and he’ll still get mad at you if you help; he’s just locked in like that… ” Butler said with a smile. When asked a follow-up about Green’s laser focus on opposing stars, Butler explained Green’s defensive mentality.
“He’s always like that, it’s not just Giannis. He don’t give a damn who he’s going up against. If he were going up against a 5-year-old, he would hate for that individual to score on him. And he wouldn’t want anyone else to help him. He’s like, ‘This is my matchup, this is on me, I have to be able to get a stop,’”
On his podcast, Green addressed Butler’s observations with a chuckle, explaining the team’s help defense was hurting the team.
“If you go watch that [Milwaukee Bucks] third quarter, I kept looking at the bench. [I was] going crazy because they kept getting 3s and there’s guys overhelping, ” Green laughed while telling co-host Baron Davis. “And I’m looking at the bench like, ‘Yo y’all keep over helping, but [Antetokounmpo] hasn’t scored on me.’”
The Warriors’ defense recent trend of overhelping
For Green, sending help defense to his side is actually overhelping. From a tactical standpoint, overhelping is an unnecessary, self-inflicted mistake.
“It’s not that I hate people helping me. I just want you to help when there’s help needed. If I get completely blown by, yeah, pull over and help. But if I’m side-to-side with a guy, I don’t need you to help because A, you’re now going to open up a passing angle for him. B, you’re going to open up an offensive rebounding possibility for them,” Green explained.
Green’s strategic reasoning behind not needing the extra help is something the Warriors need to work on. Because the Dubs are usually the undersized team, their defense makes up for the lack of size through help rotations by rotating furiously from the help side and leaving the other three guys to manage the guy freed up by the help defender. But at times, like Green talked about, sometimes it’s excessive. It leads to opponents beating the overhelp by kicking the ball out to the open man.
But at the end of the day, Green’s qualms with overhelping boil down to the pride he has in himself as a defender.
“As a competitor, this is mano-a-mano, this is man versus man. I want to see what I can do. And anytime you got a guy that doesn’t need help, you don’t have to pull another defender to go double-team,” Green explained. “I get so upset because I’m like, ‘Yo, if I need help, cool.’ But if I’m right there side-to-side with a guy, don’t come helping me and then we open up something else. That’s just how I like to operate.”