Predicting if Draymond will remain a Warrior is literally impossible

Last night, Warriors fans on social media seemed to be convinced Draymond Green will be traded, but I still have not found an overwhelming reason for the Milwaukee Bucks to want him in a trade for Giannis Antetokuonmpo.

There are a few tidbits from Wednesday morning, but imo it is still a toss-up on what Bucks GM Jon Horst wants to do. The following is another long read, just kinda every morsel of information that I have considered. So, no qualms if it’s not your cup of tea. The TLDR is quite simply the headline.

And, just so we’re clear, this is not, “Hey, Joe Lacob, Mike Dunleavy, Jr., go get this done!”

They have already made the offer. There is not much left to do except maybe the last-minute car salesman stuff where you oversell the dream, which could backfire, so forget that. Just let Horst make a decision and deal with it.

That is the beauty of the second apron. Everything is pretty much out in the open for everyone to see. Assets are assets. They must all fit under the aprons. It’s just a matter of preference and each franchise has its own challenges and styles.

This is up to Horst.

Anyone telling you this Giannis pursuit right now is in Golden State’s hands, you know they are just looking for a reason to complain.

Let them be, too.

I’m here to protect your energy, your life force. To lower your entropy and get back to your love for all things Warriors. Don’t let people make you feel bad about your team.

One of the ways to do that is to get your arms around the facts and, if there are not enough facts, then rational reasoning of the available information. 👇

If Horst is not valuing first-round picks as highly and thinks another team in the off-season can swoop in with a combination of said picks and foundational young players, then maybe he waits til the off-season and the Warriors’ chances of ever landing Giannis diminish.

We also don’t know how much say Giannis has in all this, or how much they want him to have. That could be something that makes everything else you read here moot points.

It’s all really out of our control, just like Draymond said on the podium.

Friendly reminder, all this has already been posted at near real-time speed on our Discord in a channel on there called “Dunleavy-Lacob”. Join for free here: https://whop.com/letsgowarriors-discord-free.

For automatic true real-time feeds that you can consume one by one immediately, upgrade to VIP (only $5/mo for the time being): https://whop.com/letsgowarriors-discord-vip

So here are some things that might nudge Horst our way, that just came up today:

1. Miami may have moved on from Giannis and may be targeting Ja Morant, as reported by Brett Siegel of ClutchPoints (see Discord for more thorough coverage on all of these),

2. A Warriors source told Tim Kawakami of the SF Standard that they have to look at other deals, just in case (the reporting and confirming of which might lead to urgency on Horst’s part), and

3. Brian Windhorst of ESPN said that Minnesota actually weakened their hand with the Conley deal (check the Discord server as to specifically why).

Could these three minor points nudge Horst into trading Giannis now and pounce on those Warriors picks, rather than wait until the off-season?

I should add, Washington trading for Anthony Davis — and Jaren Jackson, Jr. to Utah, which effectively takes Lauri Markkanen off the board, all of whom I’ve come up with Warriors trade scenarios for — takes another blockbuster target off the board, one less way to pivot if you’re the Warriors.

That would be a reason for the Bucks to wait. There might not be anything else for the Warriors to pivot to, and so we might be stuck and that gives time for other teams to get their assets in order by the summer.

As should be common knowledge in DubNation by now, Nick Friedell of The Athletic has confirmed from a source that the Warriors gave Jimmy Butler reassurances he would not be traded for Giannis, and Anthony Slater of ESPN got the green light from an insider to report that Draymond’s name is officially being tossed around.

Those ducks line up. You can assum3 Horst said no on Jimmy and Dunleavy conveyed that to Draymond and here we are.

And so the spotlight now shines on Green, but it doesn’t mean the math has changed. We have been running trade machine scenarios from FanSpo on our livestreams for nearly a month now, with all the possible and doable variations and combinations: Dray, Jimmy, Jonathan Kuminga, Brandin Podziemski — nearly everyone on the team has been mentioned at some point to match salaries and ensure teams are under their respective cap sheet aprons or targets.

Slater’s report seemed to officially announce Draymond trade “szn”, but actually it did not introduce a new variable to the equation.

And it was Steve Kerr who suggested the human element when he mentioned Dray’s wife, Hazel Renee, by name. That then caused Dray to have a talk with his son, DJ:

So, no, Green is not “scared” or “nervous” and the portions of the fan base assigning this as a variable that hints that Horst will indeed pull the trigger on this, those are just people with high entropy looking for morsels of reasons to try and predict what will happen.

I must credit our loyal subscriber Bruce Maro in the Comments of the Watch Party livestream last night. He suggested a scenario that could benefit the Bucks: How about if Green were bought out after being traded to the Bucks, and then he could go sign with a contender?

The buyout option seems like a good way for a rebuilding team like Milwaukee to shed salary.

But then I did a little research. The Damian Lillard waive-and-stretch has put Horst’s team right up against that 15% maximum of the cap that you can have as dead money and, from what I know, a buyout counts as dead money.

So, Green would be stuck on Milwaukee’s cap sheet (unless they subsequently traded him, of course) as an active player.

By the way, on Threads, Dray seemed to have nixed the idea propagated by Siegel, where an insider told Siegel that, should Green be traded in a Giannis deal, Draymond could theoretically decline his $27 million player option for next season.

After that, he would return to the Warriors at a veteran’s minimum salary, as they must remain under the second apron, rejoining the team with Giannis on it.

Green replied, “🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣who’s the source?” (Yes, this is also on our Discord.)

I should add my two cents: it is highly unlikely that any human being on Earth would decline $27 million in order to take about $4 million, so I don’t think that’s happening.

Now, Milwaukee already has a few contracts that are not conducive to a rebuild of finding some core young players to build around:

• Myles Turner has two years and a player option for a third that ascends from $27 to $29 to $30 million. This is why, in early trade scenarios for Giannis, Yossi Gozlan of Third Apron actually had the Warriors landing both Turner as well as Antetokuonmpo, with the salaries of Butler and Kuminga matching. It follows, mathematically, that the Warriors will not get Turner if it’s Draymond in the deal for Giannis:

• Kyle Kuzma has $20 million owed next year and is considered overpaid, but at least his contract will expire next summer.

• Bobby Portis will be paid $15 million next year and has a player option after that for $16 million.

Unless the Warriors were going to get back one of these unwanted salaries in return, which would have been the case with Jimmy in the trade, Draymond would be the fourth non-conducive-to-rebuilding contract on the Bucks, should Giannis be traded to the Warriors.

On the other hand, with the latest news yesterday where an arbitrator ruled that Terry Rozier must be paid his contract, it appears the Miami Heat can use his expiring contract in a Giannis trade. That would get $26.6 million off the Bucks’ books within months.

Then again, maybe the Heat have their eye on Morant and Rozier could be used as an expiring for Memphis.

Tyler Herro is a Milwaukee native, but Herro will make $33 million next year which is obviously more of a commitment than Dray’s $27 million. But both Herro and Green come off the books after that.

The main problem for Miami is that they only have two Draft picks to send back right now, whereas after the Draft is over, they can trade the pick they just made, plus the 2029, 2031 and 2033 picks to match the Warriors’ ability to trade four picks as well.

Maybe Horst will come to the conclusion that Herro and/or Kel’ el Ware and/or Jaime Jacquez are not that much better young pieces than Kuminga and Podziemski (and anyone else, perhaps Will Richard, too, whose contract is super-minimal).

I have concluded that Nikola Jovic is not enough of a budding star to justify his long-term contract on the Bucks’ books. I could be wrong.

Golden State might have the more desirable picks, though, because this 2026 Draft is deep and they can send this pick, 2028, 2030 (if it’s a Top-20 pick), and 2032 — not to mention the Bucks get to deploy their Draft pick a year earlier than they would if they chose the Miami stash.

Furthermore, the 2027 and 2028 have increasingly been deemed bad ones. Here’s the latest evidence, already told to us by Eric Guilleminault of NBADraft.net:

Adam Finkelstein@AdamFinkelstein

For those following the NBA Trade Deadline, you’ll notice the devaluing of 2027 and 2028 draft picks. This comes in correlation to the perception of the corresponding high school classes of 2026 (seniors) & 2027 (juniors). @ebosshoops and I discussed this a couple months back.

12:04 AM · Feb 4, 2026 · 7.6K Views

---

3 Reposts · 10 Likes

By June 2030, one Wardell Stephen Curry will be 42 years old and Giannis will be 36, so you might think the Warriors’ 2030 and 2032 picks are more valuable than the Heat’s.

The main problem for both the Warriors and Heat is that the Minnesota Timberwolves could make a few moves right after I hit “submit” on this article. With the trade yesterday of Mike Conley, the Wolves might have put the wheels in motion to try to free up cap space and get maybe a pick or two or three for them to send out Jaden McDaniels in a blockbuster for Giannis.

But then again, maybe that Conley trade was really just to shed salary. There’s already talk of him returning to the Wolves after some more transactions went down this morning — check our Discord!

McDaniels would be by far the best immediately available young talent for the Bucks to build around. For example, would you rather have $26 million of Jaden, $27 million of Dray, of $33 million on Tyler on your cap sheet next year?

Granted, with the Warriors’ deal, there’s a team option on Kuminga at $24.3 million that the Bucks could morph into a longer-term extension at a discount per year with JK.

But the issue is, can the Wolves get the picks to make this fair deal? According to Gozlan’s capsheets.com, Minnesota has zero tradable picks right now.

And so maybe Horst ought to wait until the off-season to trade Giannis — but there comes a risk with that, too, that I didn’t quite cover in the last article about this:

Giannis has a player option after next season. Any team that makes an offer for him to the Bucks, he could just say that he probably won’t sign an extension there.

That could squeeze demand, thereby making it a tighter market to field offers from in which teams pursuing Giannis might end up offering less than what they can get by trading him now.

Credit to our subscriber Mnangol for bringing that up in the chat one of our recent Giannis trade livestreams (timestamps in the Comments):

Meanwhile, you’ve got Warriors Twitter enraged at Lacob for putting the franchise at this crossroads, especially after a physically and mentally depleted loss to the beatable Sixers, who were on a back-to-back and even resting Joel Embiid.

Our roster without Steph and Jimmy sure looked very inferior last night, so those poor Xitter souls have been going down deep timelines of despair. Oh well.

Again, commenters were convinced Dray looked “nervous” or “scared” in the locker room Sunday night:

And they were convinced Dray was lying on the podium when he said his conversation with Dunleavy was “not quite the conversation y’all think it was”:

Everything ultimately boils down to what Horst decides and there are still as good reasons to do the trade with the Warriors as there are with the Heat and the Wolves.

And so maybe Draymond has actually been getting good nights’ sleep. Maybe Draymond really didn’t talk to Hazel about it at all up until the point when Steve brought it up. Maybe Dray truly didn’t think about himself getting traded until then?

But maybe Horst doesn’t even know what he’ll do yet and will just make a decision at the last possible moment, probably tonight. Bobby Marks of ESPN said today to expect so, because the deadline is tomorrow.

Why can’t we just wait for that moment? Why is everyone addicted to predicting the outcome? Just let a difficult decision be difficult.

I will address all the high-entropy blame on Kerr and Lacob for getting the franchise to this difficult spot, later.

But anyways, between this post and the previous one on Giannis, I think I’ve covered all the bases.

Don’t forget, Horst surprised the entire NBA by waiving Lillard. So if you hear that Milwaukee might wait until the off-season, you just never know until either the deal is made or the deadline passes.

🫶💙💛