“Because when James Harden asked for a trade and essentially dogged it... But he was castrated for wanting to go to a different team and everybody destroyed that man, and yet a team can come out and say, ‘Oh, we want to trade a guy,’ [Andre Drummond] and then that guy has to go sit, and if he doesn’t stay professional then he’s a cancer, and he’s not good in someone’s locker room, and he’s the issue… At some point, as players, we need to be treated with the same respect and have the same rights that the team can have.”
Golden State’s Draymond Green went on a rant after the Warriors took care of a Cavaliers team that had sat Andre Drummond because they hope to trade him before the deadline. Green aimed the double-standard of how players are treated by some fans and media compared to how teams are treated.
LeBron James said he is “right with” Green.
"We just want people to understand that there's 2 sides of the coin. It's not just one-sided." @KingJames on Draymond Green's comments from last night. pic.twitter.com/35NsTjSOwA
— Spectrum SportsNet (@SpectrumSN) February 17, 2021
“It’s the narrative of what the league has always been. From a team’s perspective, they control the narrative. They’ve controlled the narrative for how players should be, how they should act, how they should treat the organization…
“We just want people to understand that there’s two sides of the coin. It’s not just one-sided.”
Loyalty is a two-way street. Fans can’t want players to stay loyal to teams come free agency, then say “it’s just business” if the team trades him in the middle of a contract. The Clippers put on a full-court-press to re-sign Blake Griffin to a max contract, then sent him out the door less than a year later. Was that the right move for the franchise? Yes. Was it fair to Griffin, who didn’t want to leave Southern California at the time?
That’s what Green and LeBron are getting at. Drummond has every right to be frustrated with the Cavaliers, and Green and LeBron want people to notice the double standard. Even if, in the end, it changes nothing.