On Dec. 22, 2025, in the middle of a Warriors blowout win over the Orlando Magic, a heated exchange on the sideline ended with one player telling his head coach, “F*** you” before storming off to the locker room and never returning for the final 20 minutes of the game. That moment was a flashpoint in a 12-year relationship that has never been short of friction. Now, with Steve Kerr’s coaching tenure at Golden State essentially over, Draymond Green has gone on record saying his longtime coach may have held him back, and Stephen A. Smith is not buying it.

Speaking on First Take, the ESPN analyst offered a measured but pointed rebuttal to Green’s comments on The Draymond Green Show. On that podcast, Green opened up about a long-standing grievance with Kerr, saying: “As much as he’s done for me in basketball, a part of me thinks he’s hindered me in my career and what I could have become. When KD came from 2016 on, I have not had a play in our playbook. Not a single play that we run for me in our playbook since 2016. Do you think that would hinder someone as an offensive player? Of course.”Green framed it as his one major gripe in an otherwise deeply valued partnership, but the comment was enough to draw a sharp response.

Smith acknowledged both Green’s legacy and the legitimacy of his broader argument before landing his disagreement with precision. “Draymond Green is a future Hall of Famer and a former Defensive Player of the Year, an elite defender for the vast majority of his career, who also was a magnificent point forward, and 85% of his assists obviously have come courtesy of the shooting of Steph Curry, the greatest shooter God ever created. So we understand that, but we also need to understand that Steph Curry would have had a far more difficult time being Steph Curry if it were not for Draymond Green,” Smith said on First Take.

The concession was deliberate, a runway built before the pushback. “Here’s why I say it’s foul. Respectfully to Draymond Green, you are not accepting responsibility for what you didn’t do,” Smith continued. He pointed directly to one of the most scrutinized moments of Green’s career, his Game 5 suspension in the 2016 Finals, the subsequent losses in Games 6 and 7 to Cleveland, and what Green did in that Game 7 specifically. “Draymond had that explosion in Game 7, where he hit all them threes and he was balling. The fact of the matter is he’s never shot that way again in his career,” Smith said. His conclusion was blunt: “There has never been any evidence that he worked on to improve his jump shot. That is not the coach. That is you.”

Draymond Green acknowledged in the same podcast episode that he holds no permanent ill will toward Kerr over the schematic choices, and framed the gripe in its proper proportion: “I’m forever grateful that he still put me in a position to be successful and that I could become Draymond Green, despite my offensive role on our team. But if you’re gonna take one gripe and not be able to move past it for all the other things, then you’re shallow as a person.” It was a caveat Smith appreciated, but not one that changed his core verdict on the shooting question.

The Kerr-Green Relationship Has Always Been Too Big to Break

Green’s comments have a different impact in April 2026 because of the context in which they were made. The Warriors were eliminated from the play-in tournament by the Phoenix Suns in April, capping a disappointing 2025-26 season and effectively ending Kerr’s tenure, with NBC Sports Bay Area’s Monte Poole reporting that Kerr is unlikely to return as the franchise’s head coach. The emotions behind Green’s podcast were genuine, and the timing was spot on.

Steve Kerr himself had already set the tone for mutual candour weeks earlier, telling The New Yorker: “There’s things he’s done that I can never forgive him for, and yet I will do anything for him.” He described their 12-year dynamic as repeatedly requiring people to pull them apart, “three knockdown, drag-outs a year” in his first five seasons, before a period of truce settled in. Green responded to those comments on his show, recalling the December incident and telling Kerr directly: “I don’t think you like me, I don’t think you’ve ever liked me if I’m honest,” a moment after which, Green said, Kerr cried.

Stephen A. Smith’s critique sits inside that broader emotional landscape and is careful not to dismiss Green’s intelligence or his read on the system. “I’m not challenging what he’s saying about Steve Kerr in terms of schematics or anything like that,” Smith said. “I’m saying the eye test showed us that on many, many occasions, regardless of what he said, he had ample opportunity to have better numbers offensively if he simply could make open shots from the perimeter and he didn’t do it repeatedly. That’s not the coach. That’s you.”

Green, for his part, left the door open to exactly that kind of reflection, saying: “Sometimes I sit there and think, ‘What could I really have been if I stayed true to my game and what I really was?’ I’ve always just moved past that, and whatever my situation, made the best of it and became who I became.” Two men, one shared career, and an honest disagreement about where accountability ends, that is the argument Stephen A. Smith walked into, and it is far from over.