Draymond Green said being called Angel Reese during a game wasn’t just trash talk—it felt like a direct insult to his manhood.
Draymond Green didn’t just hear a courtside heckle during the Golden State Warriors’ matchup against the New Orleans Pelicans; he felt it hit his pride.
The veteran forward said being repeatedly compared to Angel Reese by a fan crossed a line, not because of the WNBA star herself, but because the insult struck at his identity as a man and father.
The incident unfolded Sunday night when a Pelicans fan began mocking Green after a missed layup and failed put-backs early in the game. The taunt? “You Angel Reese!”
“One of the first couple plays of the game, I lay the ball up and I miss it. And I tap the ball up a couple times to try to get a put-back. Tapped up, missed. Tapped up, missed. Obviously, those are offensive rebounds. I come down the court, and [the heckler] goes ‘You Angel Reese!’ And so I laugh, that was a little funny,” Green said on The Draymond Green Show.
But the joke wore thin fast.
“As the night goes on, he continues to go ‘You Angel Reese! Hey, Draymond, you’re f###### Angel Reese!’” Green continued. “It gets to a point where, as a man with four children soon to be five, once you start to add the different fillers… at a certain point, now you’re disrespecting me as a man.”
The back-and-forth escalated when Green approached the fan mid-game, a tense moment caught on video and widely shared online. Green told the heckler to “relax” and warned him he was getting “really disrespectful.”
The NBA later issued a formal warning to Green for violating player-fan interaction rules, though he avoided a fine. According to league sources, the warning was tied to maintaining professional conduct during games.
The fan, meanwhile, received a verbal warning from arena security but was not ejected and stayed in his courtside seat for the rest of the game. Golden State pulled off the win against New Orleans.
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