Draymond Green knows a thing or two about being the player everyone thinks should’ve been suspended. In December 2023, the league handed him an indefinite suspension after he put Rudy Gobert in a chokehold and struck Jusuf Nurkic in the face, his fifth significant disciplinary incident in less than two years. So when Draymond weighed in on A’ja Wilson’s heated courtside exchange with a Fever fan, he wasn’t speaking as an outsider to controversy.

The incident itself came in Game 2 of the Aces-Fever first-round series. After a foul was called on Sophie Cunningham, Wilson got tangled up with a fan near the baseline who she said stepped toward her and pointed.

She was hit with a technical foul. The fan was briefly removed and then allowed to return to his seat, and the Fever said security found no violation of the arena’s code of conduct. Wilson came back in Game 3 and dropped 36 points and 10 rebounds in a 94-83 win, prompting Green to bring it up on his podcast.

“The goat just does what the goat does,” Green said. “Already the greatest WNBA player to ever play in the WNBA. That’s not a debate. If you want a debate, go debate with your mama, because I don’t want a debate with you.”

He went further, addressing the online comparisons to his own history: “I’ve seen online, everybody, like, if that was Draymond, he’d be suspended for the rest of the season. And you could be right. But as we all know, I don’t play by the same set of circumstances that everyone else plays by, and I also am not in the WNBA, which is a completely different set of circumstances because it’s a completely different league.”

Not everyone sided with Wilson. Sophie Cunningham, who was on the floor for the original foul call, pushed back when asked about the no-discipline outcome. “That could have called for a suspension,” Cunningham said. “But she’s like the LeBron James of our league, so of course they’re not going to suspend her. There’s definitely a double standard.”

The comparison wasn’t random. Wilson has been cast as the WNBA’s LeBron-level figure before, a three-time MVP with multiple championships and Defensive Player of the Year honors who’s become the face of the league’s biggest moments.

Cunningham’s point was that status like that comes with its own kind of protection. The same dynamic, ironically, was what Draymond Green described about himself when he said he doesn’t “play by the same set of circumstances that everyone else plays by.”

Both takes landed on a similar underlying truth, even if they came from different angles. Green saw Wilson’s superstardom as validating a lack of punishment. Cunningham saw the same superstardom as the reason punishment never came in the first place.

The WNBA’s response – no fine, no suspension, full eligibility for Game 3 – settled the question of what would happen. It did nothing to settle the debate over whether it should have.