Golden State Warriors defensive star Draymond Green recently made some disrespectful comments regarding former Cleveland Cavaliers guard Matthew Dellavedova that caused a stir. Green said that he has plenty of respect for the Australian, but also claimed that he “stinks” as a basketball player.
Former NBA forward Richard Jefferson, who was a member of the 2016 Cavaliers title team with Dellavedova, has since responded to what Green had to say and came to his former teammate’s defense.
“Why is Delly catching strays?” Jefferson asked. “First of all, if people knew how good at basketball you had to be to suck in the NBA. If you knew how good you had to be, right? Delly could go.”
Fellow 2016 Cavs champion Channing Frye mentioned that Dellavedova started in the 2015 NBA Finals, and Jefferson responded.
“Yes, and win a game,” he said. “Are we being real right now? Come on. Come on, people. Hey, look, was Delly the ultimate underdog? Yes. Delly battled his way. … Delly would literally die for you. Give me that man in battle any single day — in a game, not practice, in a game. Delly had — let’s put it this way: Delly had some dog in him where he was D’ing up Kyrie [Irving] so hard it didn’t go well.”
Dellavedova is far from the most athletic or talented player ever to suit up in the NBA, but he should have earned Green’s respect with how hard he played for the Cavs against his Warriors in the 2015 NBA Finals. With Irving down for the count for a majority of that year’s championship series, Dellavedova was called on to start five out of the six games in the series.
Defensively, he was tasked with slowing down superstar Stephen Curry and guarded him about as well as one possibly can. Curry was still the Warriors’ leading scorer in the series, but he turned the ball over a bit and was held to a very poor shooting performance in Game 2.
It was on the less glamorous end of the floor where Dellavedova made his biggest impact in the 2015 NBA Finals, but he sprinkled in one big scoring performance during that best-of-seven series as well. In a Game 3 that the Cavaliers won to take a 2-1 series lead against Golden State, Dellavedova scored 20 points (the second-most on the team) while shooting 7-of-17 from the floor.
Although Cleveland came up short in 2015, Dellavedova ended up getting a ring with the team the following year.
Hopefully, Green will eventually change his mind about Dellavedova, but it’s possible he said what he said because he’s still got sour grapes about how the 35-year-old locked up Curry at points in the NBA Finals 10 years ago. At the very least, it’s evident that those who played with Dellavedova at the highest level have a lot of respect for what he brought to the table.
