Last year’s NBA Finals got heated, with Warriors forward Draymond Green at the center of the intensity. But Celtics fans, he said in a recent interview with Complex Sports, crossed the line.
Green, 32, said that Celtics fans taunted him by using the n-word during games at the TD Garden last summer.
“I was rattled,” Green told Complex Sports. “You hear boos, and I mean I’ve heard people screaming and yelling at me everywhere that I go,” Green told Pierce Simpson in the interview. “But I’ve never heard an entire gym, every time I touched the ball or I don’t have the ball, an entire gym [screaming] ‘F–k you Draymond.’ I thought that was cool, actually. That didn’t rattle me.”
“But when I’m running down the court and it’s ‘b—h,’ it’s the n-word, those are insults at my character. Those are insults to me as a man. So you’re in this place where it’s like, ‘I really want to grab one of these people and wring their neck,’ but I’m going to lose that battle.”
Boston fans have a troubling history of racism. Even their own star, Marcus Smart, revealed in 2020 that a fan called him the n-word outside the arena. MLB player Torii Hunter has said that Red Sox fans called him the n-word “a hundred times” throughout his career. Orioles outfielder Adam Jones shared a similar experience at Fenway Park.
Earlier this year, LeBron James said he hated Boston fans, calling them “racist as fuck” on his HBO Show, “The Shop.” James is a part-owner of the Boston Red Sox.
Green enters just about every NBA arena as a villain, a role he appears to often embrace. His physical on-court style and loud personality makes him easy for opposing fans to root against.
But the Celtics crowd, by Green’s account, was different.
“And then to hear people say, ‘Oh, that’s just a part of the game.’ Y’all put a code of conduct up on the screen every night, that’s just a part of the game? Oh, it’s a part of the game because it’s me,” Green told Complex Sports.
The Warriors, who dispatched the Celtics in six games for their fourth NBA title of the current dynasty, return to Boston on Jan. 19.