Draymond Green Says Warriors Wouldn’t Have Won ’17, ’18 Finals Without Durant

During a collaboration event between their two podcasts, JJ Redick asked Draymond Green for his opinion on whether Kevin Durant gets enough credit for his role in helping the Warriors win NBA titles in both 2017 and ’18. 

Golden State won a championship before he joined the team in 2015 and will now raise another banner after beating the Celtics earlier this month in the Finals.

“I don’t think that team wins another championship if Kevin doesn’t come,” Green said. “Now you may say, ‘But y’all won the fourth one without Kevin.’ But there’s a gap in there where teams started to figure us out.”

After the Warriors beat an injured Cavaliers team in 2015 to win the NBA title, they lost to the same team the next year after posting an NBA-record 73 wins during the regular season. Durant joined the squad in free agency that offseason and in both championship runs over the following two years the Warriors defeated the Cavaliers in the Finals. In 2018 they also beat the Rockets in seven games in the Western Conference finals to get there. 

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Redick decided to ask Green whether they would have beaten Houston in 2018 without Durant.

“Yeah, we was beating them for sure,” Green said on the Rockets. “That team was never gonna beat us.”

Then Redick followed up by asking whether they would have beat Cleveland in their Finals matchups. 

“We would not have beat the Cavs coming back around without Kevin,” Green said. 

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