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Ron Artest was called plenty of things over the course of his time in the NBA, but if you’re familiar with his career, you likely know “voice of reason” wasn’t one of them. However, he seems to think he can help Draymond Green turn things around after the Warriors big man was suspended for five games after choking out Rudy Gobert.
Over the course of his career, Draymond Green has earned a reputation as one of the biggest instigators in the NBA thanks to his impressive inability to restrain himself on the basketball court.
While plenty of guys who play at a similar level of intensity are able to straddle the line between “competitor” and “borderline psychopath,” the longtime member of the Golden State Warriors has racked up more than $2 million worth of fines and been suspended a grand total of five times with the help of the 170 technical fouls he’s accumulated during his time in the league.
Green has been at the center of plenty of controversial incidents, but to his credit, he’s never been responsible for sparking one of the most infamous moments in basketball history—which is more than Ron Artest can say due to his role in the chaotic melee known as “The Malice at the Palace.”
With that said, the 44-year-old who is now legally known as “Metta Sandiford-Artest” is older and wiser than he was during his playing days, and he seems to think he can use the lessons he’s learned to show Green the light.
Artest recently chatted with CinemaBlend for a conversation where he positioned himself as a potential mentor for the fiery Golden State forward, saying:
“I want to talk to Draymond to make sure he’s OK. He’s an energized player. This is something that I didn’t expect from Draymond. If you look at my career and you look at Draymond’s career, he’s got four rings, and he was always able to keep his energy under wraps…
I would prefer to speak to Draymond to check on him, so hopefully one day he can reach out to me because his career is going very well…
So to see him kind of overreact such as I have overreacted in times in my career, it’s just a thing where you want to reach out to a player. So I hope that I can actually chat with him and just see where his mind is at and stuff like that.”
The fact that Artest seems to think Green has been able to keep his temper in check prior to the incident with Gobert makes you wonder if he’s really that familiar with Draymond’s game, but with that said, I’d pay good money to hear the kind of advice he’d dole out if they got the chance to talk.