The suspended animation of Draymond Green

He'll miss Thursday's Game 3 for the Warriors after yet another step -- or stomp -- across the line.

Draymond Green, as they say, is “one of one.” There are a few others who can process basketball like he does, but they weren’t born with his personality, one that exhausts all who inhabit his world, except him.

There are a few who are performatively irritating, like Patrick Beverley, but none of them can bend the game as he does. Green’s uniqueness is what should be celebrated. Any more of him, and the NBA would incinerate.

Unless you’re smart enough to have achieved the true offline life, you know Green’s latest misadventure.

In Game 2 of their first-round series, Sacramento’s Domantas Sabonis got tangled up with Golden State’s Klay Thompson and hit the floor, face up. At that moment, Green was turning to head downcourt, and Sabonis was at his feet. Sabonis reached up, perhaps instinctively, and grabbed Green’s ankle. Green freed himself and then took a step. If you’re in Green’s corner you think he was just using Sabonis’ chest as a balancing mechanism. If you’re anywhere close to objective, you saw Green’s action for what it was. He robustly stomped Sabonis, bruising his sternum and causing immense pain, although Sabonis would return. The Sacramento star is scheduled to play in Game 3 Thursday night in San Francisco, but Green was given a Flagrant 2 foul and thus was ejected. The NBA then banned Green from Game 3.

Both things can be true. Sabonis shouldn’t have grabbed Green’s foot. He got a technical foul for that. Green definitely shouldn’t have stomped Sabonis. Duke’s Christian Laettner did that to Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake in the epic 1992 NCAA Eastern Regional final in Philadelphia and drew a technical foul, except it was a tap dance compared to this. No doubt Laettner would be ejected and maybe banned fron the game in these more Puritan times.

But there was a unanimity to the disapproval of Laettner that doesn’t exist here. Shaquille O’Neal is not the only one who said Green shouldn’t have been tossed. Charles Barkley persuasively argues that Green might not have been suspended had he dropped the incident and gone ahead and played, but that’s like telling Peter Townshend to quit smashing guitars. Green baited the Sacramento crowd, prompted a line of cops to gather behind the Golden State bench, and did it all in front of commissioner Adam Silver. That did not help his cause, but then Green did virtually the same thing last year when he grabbed the jersey of Memphis’ Brandon Clarke and pulled him down, earning another Flagrant 2.

NBA disciplinarian Joe Dumars said Green’s outlaw history played a part and, as Kenny Smith said, chronic violators of highway-safety guidelines get special punishment, too.

In Game 4 of the 2016 NBA Finals, with the Warriors leading Cleveland, 2-1, Green found himself on the floor as LeBron James stepped over him, and Green responded with a fist that landed on the King’s jewels. He did that even though he knew he would be suspended with his next flagrant foul, because he’d already earned three in the postseason. Cleveland won that Game 5 and also won the next two, becoming the first league champion to wipe out a 1-3 Finals deficit. Green took the blame for the Finals loss, but the Warriors wouldn’t have been competitive in Game 7 if not for his 32 points, 15 rebounds and 11-for-15 shooting. That’s typical Green. The more serrated the edge, the sharper he is.

When it was over, Green sought out James and congratulated him. Not all Warriors did.

“The one thing that bothers me is that I dominated that game,” Green said. “I would have been the Finals MVP. And that totally changes the narrative. Good luck leaving me off the NBA 75 (the 75 best players of all-time) if I was Finals MVP. But there’s the old adage: You get what you deserve. And I got what I deserved.”

That is ultimately why Green is so fascinating. You can’t make an elevator pitch for Green’s Hall of Fame candidacy, not unless the elevator gets stuck for an hour or two. It is true that he can screw up his own team. He slugged teammate Jordan Poole during a practice session before this season, at which point he was suspended for an exhibition game (now, there’s a deterrent). Coach Steve Kerr bluntly talked of the broken trust between Green and his teammates. But that trust also had to be repaired on the night Green and Kevin Durant squabbled during a November huddle against the Clippers. Green was already perturbed because he thought Durant was headed elsewhere after the season. If that wasn’t true before that argument, it became so.

Surely the Warriors have been tempted to unburden themselves of Green. What has stopped them? Maybe it’s their record. They are 58-56 when he doesn’t play. This season they are playing .562 basketball with him and they are .333 without him.

“We don’t win any of our championships without Draymond Green,” Kerr acknowledged on Wednesday.

Anyone who starts the tape when the whistle blows and stops it when it blows again will see why Green’s game is so irresistible. Stripped of the defiance and the irrationality, Green is the Warriors’ connective tissue. Not only is he one of the best defenders in the history of the game and a dogged rebounder as well, he can be the Warriors’ top playmaker, waiting for the foes to double-team Steph Curry and then taking over the middle of the floor to run Golden State’s 4-on-3 offense. Those instant decisions have kept Green essential, even at 33 and in the final year of his contract. Stats-obsessed voters never have found the proper place for Green on their MVP ballots. There were some years when that place should have been at the top.

In that 2015-16 season Green became the first NBA player with 1,000 points, 500 rebounds and assists and 100 blocks and steals in the same season. Like another Michigan Stater whose magic had no precedent, Green is sincerely disinterested in how much he scores. But he is obsessed, uncontrollably so, with his pursuit of respect. It’s been 11 years since he was the 38th player taken in the NBA draft, behind such prospects as Bernard James, Arnett Moultrie, Fab Melo and Andrew Nicholson, yet Green will never bandage that wound. When he feels wronged, there is no boundary to his rancor, no time limit to his argument. That is when the technicals and the punitive measures come in, because for everyone else, the show must go on. Yet that is often when Green starts playing his best.

How does one square Green’s natural unselfishness with his insistence on personal validation at all costs, his lust for the last word? One can’t. Welcome to the human condition.

On Thursday, the Warriors of Curry, Green, Thompson and Kerr will begin their quest to overcome an 0-2 series deficit for the first time, and eventually they hope to win a game in Sacramento, which would mean a 28th consecutive series with at least one road win. The cheapest ticket in San Francisco for this one is $212.

It’s Draymond Green’s world, even though he can barely live there himself.

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