Draymond Green Thinks The NBA’s Fine System Keeps Players From ‘Being Wealthy’ After Their Careers

Draymond Green joined his TNT colleague Shaquille O’Neal on this week’s episode of The Big Podcast, and the topic turned to Green’s many fines and suspensions, which led the four-time champion to get some things off of his chest. Mainly, he takes exception to being fined because, in his words, the system prevents players from accumulating wealth after they’re done playing.

Draymond Green has made $153 million in his career, with another $50 million guaranteed to him (and a $27 million player option) left on his current contract. With a 37 percent federal tax rate and a 14 percent state tax in California, that gets cut roughly in half, but that still leaves more than $100 million in career earnings he will take home over his career — if this is the final contract he gets. Green has been fined a lot and his cumulative total of checks sent to the league for techs and fines have run him around $900,000. Suspensions have cost him more than $3 million, which is because he loses game checks for those absences — with his 12-game suspension for hitting Jusuf Nurkic in the face costing him nearly $2 million. In the words of Linus Caldwell, that’s a lot of money to a lot of people, but for Green, who is on the extreme end of the fine/suspension spectrum, that’s around 4 percent of his career post-tax earnings that have gone to the league.

The technical foul complaint would be the most persuasive argument if those were bigger expenditures, because some of those Ts are not always deserved (although, I’m not sure that’s often the case with Draymond) — also the league will rescind technicals that were deemed unnecessary. It’s the suspensions that have done real damage to Green’s wallet, and those suspensions are the direct result of choices he made — choking Rudy Gobert, swinging his arm wildly and hitting Jusuf Nurkic, kicking LeBron James in the nuts, etc. As such, it’s really hard to imagine many people really feeling for Draymond about the money he’s lost, and I doubt he’s going to have a lot of support for his crusade against the fine system (where all the money goes to charity).