Draymond Green's Magic Trick

Plus, a look at Aaron Gordon's late-career shooting improvement

Draymond Green has played in eight playoff games and has already racked up a combined six technical and flagrant fouls.

A popular joke on Twitter is that it’s actually smart for Draymond to pick up a technical foul early in a game so that he can do Draymond stuff with impunity the rest of the time. Seth Partnow likes to joke that a technical foul is Draymond’s “cloak of invisibility”. Draymond knows the NBA doesn’t want its marquee players ejected and he acts accordingly.

It’s impossible to say for certain whether referees treat Draymond differently, but there are clues. For example, Draymond Green has gotten away with more illegal plays in close games this year than any other player.

How do I know this? The NBA told me.

Whenever a game is within three points and under two minutes the NBA issues what they call a Last Two Minute Report — or L2M report.

These reports contain a review of every call that was made, and perhaps more interestingly, every no call during the last two minutes of the corresponding game. In these reports we can see things like when a player should have been called for a foul and wasn’t (what the league refers to as Incorrect No Calls). Or when a player was called for a foul, but shouldn’t have been (Incorrect Calls).

This season, Green has gotten away with seven illegal plays that he should have been whistled for but wasn’t. That’s according to these L2M reports that have been collected, cleaned, and made publicly available on GitHub by Twitter user atlhawksfanatic.

Here’s an example from earlier this season when Draymond fouled Keldon Johnson on a go ahead bucket for the San Antonio Spurs, but wasn’t called for it.

Since 2020-21, Draymond has been guilty of committing a foul or violation in 31 similarly illegal plays that weren’t called in the moment but should have been. That’s the 2nd most among all NBA players on a total basis.

Only Bam Adebayo has been involved in more plays (32) in which he got away with something he shouldn’t have during that time period. But a key difference is that Adebayo has played in 143 games that have a L2M report whereas Green has only played in 110 since 2020-21. When you adjust for the number of games a player appeared in that required a L2M report, Draymond looks like an outlier.

The chart above shows the number of times a player should have been called for a foul or violation on the x-axis. Meanwhile, the y-axis shows the number of times a player was disadvantaged by a no call — these are usually instances where a player’s defender should have been called for a foul and wasn’t. Note that I’ve scaled the values on each axis to put them on a per L2M game basis.

One way to look at this chart is to say that players generally benefit from no calls nearly as often as they are disadvantaged by them. I’ve written in the past that Nikola Jokic has gotten the fuzzy end of the lollipop more than any other player in recent years, but as you can see on the chart he’s also frequently been the benefactor of no calls. So it can be hard to look at this data and make an impassioned case that refs are biased towards any particular player.

And then there’s Draymond. Way off in the bottom right-hand corner by himself.

We can chalk some of this up to the fact that Draymond plays Center, a position that is naturally going to put him in situations where fouls are likely to occur (read: near the basket) and it’s not fair to expect the refs to see and call everything. But some of it is also because referees have trouble recognizing Draymond’s wrongdoings in particular.

The easiest way to show this is to look at what percent of the time Draymond is whistled for a foul or a violation when he’s actually committed one. That’s what the table below shows in the column I’ve called “Recognition Rate,” which is just the total number of correct calls made against a player divided by the sum of both correct calls and incorrect no calls involving a player.

There are 72 players that have been involved in at least 50 combined calls and no calls during the regular season since 2020-21. Among those 72 players, Draymond has the third lowest Recognition Rate. To put it another way, referees have blown their whistle on Draymond when they should have only 67 percent of the time in the last two minutes of close games. Adebayo and Rudy Gobert are the only two players with a lower Recognition Rate during that time period.

Again, all this comes from the NBA’s Last Two Minute Reports over the last five seasons. So we’re dealing with a limited sample of data that might not be perfectly representative of the bigger picture. It’s possible that referees are better at policing Draymond’s antics during the other 46 minutes of the game.

I wondered if Draymond’s ability to turn himself invisible showed up in other ways beyond no calls on the L2M Reports. So I asked Ramiro Bentes, a wizard with NBA play-by-play data, to help me look at how well the Warriors have performed as a team on defense when Draymond is on the court with exactly one technical or flagrant foul.

It stands to reason that when a player is in foul trouble or at risk of getting ejected, they’ll be less aggressive on defense, which could hurt their team’s overall ability to defend. But that hasn’t been the case with Draymond and the Warriors.

Over the last five seasons, Draymond has been on the court for more than 800 minutes with exactly one technical or flagrant foul. In those minutes, the Warriors have a 110 Defensive Rating. That’s a strong number, but not all that different from what the Warriors Defensive Rating is with Draymond on the court, regardless of his technical foul status.

But that’s what makes Draymond one of the best defenders of his generation. Lesser players would dial back their aggressiveness knowing they’re on thin ice with the refs, but Draymond stays the course and is rewarded for it with the ability to occasionally make himself invisible to referees.

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Mark it Zero

Speaking of non-calls, in the Pacers comeback against the Cavaliers the other night, the NBA said there were two different lane violations that occurred in the last two minutes that should have been called, but weren’t.

That’s not surprising given that Lane Violations are some of the most common calls that referees do not recognize in the moment. Since 2015, there have been 166 Lane Violations that occurred in the last two minutes of close games. The refs only called 67 of them in the moment, which is to say Lane Violations are only called 40 percent of the time.

The only calls that are recognized less often in the moment are Defensive Three Seconds and Traveling.

What’s interesting is that when refs do call Lane Violations, they’re almost always correct in doing so. 67 of the 68 times a referee blew their whistle for a Lane Violation, it was deemed the correct call, which gives it a 98.5 percent accuracy rating. They should try to blow their whistle more, then.

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High Jumper to Jump Shooter

I was talking with some friends about Aaron Gordon’s improvement as a jump shooter while watching a recent Denver Nuggets playoff game. Gordon, who is in his 11th NBA season, notched career highs in free throw percentage, short- and long- midrange percentage, and three-point percentage this year. And he’s been letting it fly in this year’s playoffs.

There was his game winner against Oklahoma City from Game 1, which he shot from beyond the arc without hesitation. And then he busted out this combo last night that made me say, “woah.”

By my count, Aaron Gordon is the first NBA player since Rajon Rondo in 2020-21 to set career highs in free throw percentage, midrange field goal percentage, and three-point percentage all at the same time this late into a player’s career. In fact, those were the only two players that I could find that had accomplished such a feat ten or more years into their career since 2000-01.

It’s worth noting that Rondo set his career highs across those three categories on considerably lower volume than Gordon. For example, Gordon shot 44 percent from three on 172 attempts this year. Rondo shot 41 percent on just 89 attempts in 2020-21.