The Golden State Warriors held the roaring parade and rally to celebrate their 2014-15 NBA championship on Friday, with players, coaches and honored guests riding through Oakland on buses, cars and floats as the adoring Bay Area crowd cheered in appreciation of the franchise's first NBA championship in 40 years. It sure looked like an amazing time on TV, and no Warrior appeared to be enjoying himself more than Draymond Green.
The versatile power forward and restricted free agent to be, who capped a star-making season with a triple-double in the Warriors' title-clinching Game 6 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers, continued his post-victory celebration into Friday's parade. He rolled into the festivities atop a double-decker bus alongside Oakland hero and Seattle Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch, which makes that one very, very thorough and official mode of transportation:
He then proceeded to get off the bus and start high-fiving the fans lining the parade route, like the people's champion he truly is:
Then, he decided to go beyond mere dap, and share something a little bubblier with his adoring public:
When the rolling party reached its final destination at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, Green was very ready to smile for the cameras.
Green joined teammate Klay Thompson for a "blue carpet" interview with CSN Bay Area's Rosalyn Gold-Onwude, and it was certainly a memorable interaction that probably won't earn Draymond any fans in the greater Ohio area.
"Klay Thompson? Yup," Green said. "Splash Brothers? Yup. Cavaliers? Nope. We won? Yup. They suck? Yup. We here? Yup. They not? Nope."
You can almost feel Klay Thompson's entire essence split right down the middle — 50 percent urging him to take a couple of steps to his right and just get away, 50 percent feeling utterly unable to move, frozen in place by what he was watching happen into a microphone and camera.
Draymond's parade-float partner, Lynch, later joined his mother, social-media and trash-talk aficionado Mary Babers-Green, on the blue carpet for a pretty great chat that saw the two share a hug (and saw Marshawn accidentally swear on live television).
I just love the way Lynch smiles and starts making an eating gesture after Babers-Green says, "Men that don't work don't eat." So great all the way around.
Lest you thought Green's media availability had reached an end, however, he turned up a few minutes later as Gold-Onwude chatted with center Andrew Bogut.
"Big fella take all my money in poker," Green said, his left arm around warmly slung around the 7-foot Australian's shoulders. "He even created an app to take my money. Bogut is better than Phil Hellmuth. Watch out now."
If that's true — and I'm not here to denigrate Bogut's poker game — then Draymond's frontcourt partner might soon find himself with an awful lot more money to take.
And he'll likely get the opportunity to take it off Green's hands, too, since the restricted-free-agent-to-be doesn't seem particularly interested in doing anything other than coming back in blue and yellow.
And the Bay, we suspect, will eagerly await a repeat of this particular command performance next June.
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