Draymond Green reflects on his future amid uncertainty - ESPN

ENTERING THEIR MARCH 2 game against the LA Clippers, the Golden State Warriors were two games above .500 but stumbling in the wrong direction. They had lost three of five coming out of the All-Star break, and their cushion over the Clippers for eighth in the West had been trimmed to 2½ games.

But they built a 17-point first-half lead.

«We had a game going,» Warriors coach Steve Kerr said. "Draymond [Green] was all over Kawhi [Leonard]."

But momentum disintegrated quickly in the second half. Leonard and Darius Garland cranked up the production and the Warriors, without the injured Stephen Curry and Jimmy Butler, didn't have the offensive firepower to keep up.

This familiar losing script — try hard but ultimately fail because of a lack of game-changing talent — had frustrated Green to the edge of another boiling point. As fourth-quarter hope melted away, he thought about erupting at a referee, coach or an opponent in an attempt to change the inevitable, a favored tactic of his to shock his team's system.

«No,» Green told himself. «It's not the thing to do.»

In an Oklahoma City hotel lobby four days after the fact, Green is retelling this story to ESPN, using it as a prime example of his aging and required acceptance of the franchise's fading place in the NBA pecking order.

«I can raise the temperature level of a gym, an arena, a team like crazy,» Green said, snapping his finger for effect. «Like that. Whenever I want to.»

But his instinct for escalation doesn't line up with the reality of a team whose season has cratered. In early January, Butler tore an ACL. In late January, Curry vanished from the lineup because of an «unpredictable» knee issue that has forced him to miss 26 straight games.

That has left Green to deal