Draymond Green Agrees to 4-Year Contract Extension With Warriors

This NBA offseason has abounded with big trades, seismic free agent signings and a general sense that the balance of power in the league will have shifted somewhat going into the 2019-20 season. But one big-name player’s destination of choice is the same place he’s been playing professional basketball for his entire career.

Draymond Green signed a 4-year, $99.7 million contract extension with the Golden State Warriors on Saturday.

Jeff Zillgitt of USA Today argues that this move suggests that the Warriors don’t plan on shying away from the challenges of the upcoming season. He writes that “the Warriors have their core of Green, Steph Curry and Klay Thompson locked up through the 2021-22 season. They also acquired D’Angelo Russell in the offseason.”

Green’s extension pays him $22.2M, $24M, $25.8M and $27.6M over the course of the deal. The Warriors will have $129M and $138M committed to their four max players — Curry, Thompson, Green and Russell — in the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons, respectively.

— Adrian Wojnarowski (@wojespn) August 3, 2019

The team will still face plenty of challenges of the course of the season — not the least of which is Thompson’s recovery from the ACL surgery he underwent in July. In a recent interview, Klay told ESPN that “he doubted he would be back before the All-Star break.”

Green’s career began with the Warriors after they selected him in the draft in 2012. He’s credited the timing of that with helping him to develop as a player. For the coming season, the Warriors will adopt a similar youth-centric philosophy. “Last season, the Warriors had the third-oldest roster in the NBA with an average age of 28.4 years old,” an NBC Sports report noted. “Currently, they have the eighth-youngest roster in the league, averaging 24.9 years old.”

It’s a situation where Green’s prodigious knowledge of the game will come in handy. The Western Conference will be a more challenging environment next season, but the Warriors don’t seem to be backing down from it.

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