Draymond Green might be getting Kevin Durant mad online again with his latest comments.
The Golden State Warriors star Green did a mailbag segment on an episode this week of his podcast for The Volume. One fan sent in a question asking Green who he thought was the better pure scorer — Carmelo Anthony in his prime or Durant in his prime. Green surprisingly chose Anthony.
“I’m going to go with Melo,” said Green. “And the reason I’m gonna go with Melo is because I grew up watching Melo score the basketball. Melo came to the league in ’03. I was 13 years old. I grew up watching Melo get a bucket however you wanted.
“You wanted mid-post work, [his] first step [was] crazy,” added Green about Anthony. “You wanted straight block work, [his] fadeaway [was] tough, and Melo will bully the hell out of somebody. You want the trey ball, we all know he can do that. He’s just a three-point shooter for the USA Team. We all know USA Olympic Melo is crazy. [He can] get to the free-throw line.”
Green, one of the premier defenders of this NBA generation, played (and reached the mountaintop) with both stars. Green and Anthony won Olympic gold together at Rio in 2016. Meanwhile, Green and Durant won two NBA championships together on the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018 (plus Olympic gold at Rio in 2016 and at Tokyo in 2020).
As Green hinted at, Anthony was probably the more fundamentally sound and versatile scorer. He could get buckets by facing up or having his back to the basket. Anthony was also averaging almost 10 foul shots per game at his apex and won a scoring title in his late prime in 2012-13. But Durant, with four scoring titles to his own name, is likely the more gifted scorer at 6-foot-10 with the ball-handling ability of a guard. Durant’s high release makes his shot near-impossible to block, and he is a 50-40-90 threat every single year.
Green did take a very long time to decide between Anthony and Durant and admitted at the end that there might not be a wrong answer. But this may be a repeat of earlier this year when Durant interpreted some other remarks that Green made about him as shade.
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