Warriors' Draymond Green opens up on tiff with Kevin Durant

Golden State Warriors All-Star Draymond Green said getting suspended last November after an altercation with Kevin Durant caused Green to question his standing with the franchise and his relationship with general manager Bob Myers.

"I started to tell myself in my mind, 'Wow, [Myers is] flipping on me,'" Green told ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski on The Woj Pod during a joint interview with Myers.

"And it just felt like, 'Wow, OK, is this not the guy I've known for all these years? Is he turning on me?' And I started to tell myself all of these things, and then everybody's like, 'Oh my God, the Warriors sided with Kevin Durant.'

"That was the hardest thing for me, because a lot of people don't understand me. Bob does."

The Warriors suspended Green for one game without pay after an on-court disagreement with Durant following a loss to the LA Clippers extended into the locker room. Witnesses called it one of the most volatile episodes of the Warriors' dynastic run. Durant, whose pending free agency hung over the argument and its aftermath, left the Warriors for the Brooklyn Nets in July.

Myers said he was still unsure how Green felt almost a year later.

"Where are you now with that?" Myers asked Green during the podcast. "I don't even know."

Said Green: "I just had to accept the fact that I was wrong. And once I was able to get over my stubbornness and accept the fact that I was wrong, I was able to move on. I lost [Durant's] trust. How do I get that back? Not so we can win a championship or we can win some games ... but I actually loved this guy, like that's really my brother. And so not knowing what's next in our relationship bothered me more.

"Bob and [head coach Steve Kerr], they told me, like, 'You need to apologize to Kevin,' before I got suspended. And I said, 'No, I'm not apologizing because y'all telling me to apologize. I'm not gonna do that.' And I didn't. And I never apologized to him until I came to grips with myself. ... Not because of some games or the team ain't flowing right. But I can kind of see a look in my brother's face that I have not seen. He's hurt. How do I fix that? And that was what bothered me more than anything."

Myers opened up about the fallout from the incident, too.

"The only way I can go to bed after that decision was I thought what we did was right," Myers said. "Sometimes in life you do the best you can. ... And could it have been handled differently? I think it could be handled differently preceding that. If I had to go back, it wouldn't have been after. It would have been before.

"What people don't know -- which is so hard to know, which requires time and energy -- is Kevin and Draymond probably will be the closest guys. They're going to be friends for their whole life like this. ... In the aftermath when they spoke, they laid it out for each other and they're like, OK, I got ya. Like, now I know where you're coming from, from both sides. But that could have happened earlier and that would've prevented it."

Green also addressed Durant's recent comments to The Wall Street Journal in September that he never truly felt like one of the guys in Golden State.

"The thing that bothered me most was not that Kevin was mad or not that people were saying I was wrong or not that we lost that particular game and definitely not that Kevin decided to leave," Green said. "The thing that bothered me the most was that when, you know, when Kevin goes on his things he's doing in the media or stuff and he says, oh, I wasn't a part of that. Or, like, I was different than those guys. A part of it is like, no, he [was] one of us, and it pisses me off."