Draymond Green Ruined Small Ball, OKC and the Third Guard Brought It BackA lot of NBA discourse revolves around how to build teams in terms of combinations of player archetypes. But much like the league itself for five years, this conversation has largely been ruined by the mid-2010s Golden State Warriors. In particular, Draymond Green’s one-of-one skillset enabled the famous and vaunted “Death Lineup” — where Green would play center in a grouping that would come to define what “small ball” meant in the NBA going forward — much to the detriment of the teams to follow.
What spawned from this was an obsession with stretch bigs and wings that could be passable playing “up” a position (a 4 that can play the 5, a 3 that can play the 4, etc.) in the amorphous name of, among other things, spacing. What’s lost from these cheap imitations is the real advantage of small ball and why Draymond was the ultimate skeleton key when it came to unlocking those advantages in a way that cannot be recreated.
The real value of going small is not the spacing that it creates, rather, it's the amount of dribble, pass, shoot that can be put on the court at once. “Dribble, pass, shoot” is the colloquial term for players that possess every skill that a team would want from a perimeter player offensively. This versatile skillset is often inversely correlated with height, leading to the aptly named “small” ball, but the roster makeup of the first team to really truly buy into maximizing this strategy has caused the term to be misconstrued for the better part of a decade.
I don’t think it’s outlandish to say that Draymond Green is the most unique player to ever play basketball. His combination of defensive versatility, playmaking ability, and IQ is unparalleled in league history. This skill intersection made him the fulcrum of those dominant Golden State teams, allowing Coach Kerr to play him at center and slot more offensive skill into the lineup without losing much/any rim protection or offensive paint production (largely through his interior passing rather than interior finishing, but the result is the same).
