Danny Green talks Kawhi, 2017-18 injury and more in podcast debut

The other guy coming to the Raptors in the Kawhi Leonard trade has a podcast. While Danny Green’s decision to enter the Toronto basketball podcast market alongside such giants as Locked on Raptors and the HeadQuarters is a daring one, the debut episode of Inside the Green Room suggests the show will offer an untapped perspective for Raptors fans to absorb the team from.

In his debut episode with co-host Harrison Sanford, Green touched on all angles of last week’s franchise-altering trade — from how he found out the deal was going down, to his feelings about going to Toronto, to his own struggles with injury last season and yes, some Kawhi stuff to. Here are some choice snippets from the 50-ish minute chat between Green and Sanford.

Toronto is Good!

Green seemed excited about the move to Toronto, and sounds as though he’s embracing the change after playing for so many years in San Antonio.

Everybody from New York was texting me too, “Toronto! Closer to home, it’s an hour flight, there’s a flight every hour on the hour,” everybody can make it any point now, my family’s excited about it. And obviously I’m always a positive guy I look at all the postiivites in everything. It’s a great thing, obviously it was the number one team in East, you know we’ve got me and Kawhi, we could do something special there. It’s a really nice city, obviously a little colder weather and some taxes might be a little tough but like I said it’s closer to home and it’s a really good team in the east ... We’re not old yet, we can be a huge plus and hopefully bring this team to the next level that they’re hoping to be.

Encouraging start!

Playing Injured?

Probably the spiciest — and certainly most aggregated — portion of the podcast is the stretch Green spent detailing his health struggles last season, and detailed how he played much of the season with a torn groin.

I had a pretty decent start to the season,I thought anyway ... a lot of guys got an opportunity because Kawhi was out. I think December came around, we played Boston ... we actually won the game but I had strained by groin, first half, probably first or second quarter, trying to chase down a block ... I wanted to go back in, but get an MRI next day and see it was a slight strain ... So we do the rehab, doing everything we were supposed to do. With a groin strain it’s hard to tell between a groin and a sports hernia sometimes ... After some time, it healed, started to try to play again. Certain days I’d have bad days, some days would be good and I would feel it ... my agent (said) maybe we should get a second opinion. I didn’t want to cause I have full faith and belief in the Spurs staff, they’ve always been great to me, they’ve always done right by me, they’ve done a hell of a job. So throughout the season, we’ve monitored it, but we never went back to check on it again.

I see where Kawhi’s coming when he’s hot his second opinion, cause a lot of times you’ll get information from outside sources and not saying that the Spurs staff is not up to par, it’s just that not everybody’s a specialist in every area ... it’s not like they’re a specialist with a groin area or a sports hernia so to go to a guy who may be in Philly to get a second opinion shouldn’t have hurt.

So end of the season I had to get another MRI ... I had a strain was there, with a little tear. Since then I’ve been rehabbing it ... we don’t know how long I’ve been playing with the strain or how long the tear has happened cause we hadn’t really circled back cause of some of the other injuries that happened during the season.

It’s easy to read into Green’s comments there and immediately point the finger at the Spurs medical staff as being in the wrong, and therefore at fault for how Leonard’s quad injury was handled. You could do that, but I don’t know — what Green said mostly sounded like a nuanced critique of how most NBA teams’ medical staffs are comprised, and an understanding of why Leonard may have sought a second opinion for his own injury.

Later in the segment Green takes some blame himself for being too competitive to really give his groin the proper time to heal. And before Raptors fans get finger-pointy and ridicule the Spurs’ medical staff, please recall the time the Raptors had DeMarre Carroll play through plantar fasciitis, then a bum knee before Jimmy Butler’s 40-point half made the decision to send Carroll in for surgery for them. Doctors make mistakes, professional athletes are difficult to protect from themselves. Perhaps the Spurs medical staff had something to do with Kawhi’s discontent in San Antonio — but all the reporting about the situation suggests there were way more factors at play.

Other Notes

There were plenty of other cool nuggets in the podcast, and you should give it a listen in its entirety. Some of those include:

• Details of the meeting the Spurs players had with Kawhi near the end of the season to get a handle on whether or not he was going to return. The meeting didn’t yield a firm answer from Kawhi, per Green, and it was also a peaceful meeting free of any hard feelings. It did however, leak to the media in a more negative light in the days following the meeting.
• Green discussing how DeMar DeRozan will fit in San Antonio.
• A plea to random people at airports and on the street to stop asking him about Kawhi’s recovery.
• Some tantalizing discussion of how monstrous the Green/Leonard pairing is on defense.

Here’s to transcribing and over-analyzing many, many more of these. The Raptors need to re-sign Bebe just to get him a guest spot on the show with Green.