Draymond Green Calls False Comments About Karl-Anthony Towns ‘Unfortunate’

Draymond Green didn’t exactly apologize for his comments about Karl-Anthony Towns. 

Towns missed the Knicks game against the Warriors on Tuesday due to personal reasons. On his podcast, The Draymond Green Show with Baron Davis, the Warriors forward accused Towns of missing the game because he didn’t want to play against Jimmy Butler, the Warriors’ latest acquisition. 

“Some would say he didn’t play because Jimmy was in the building,” said Green, who also serves as an TNT Sports analyst. “I don’t know. … I saw KAT’s pops at the game yesterday. I got incredible love for the OG, his pops is an incredible man. But yeah, they say KAT didn’t play because Jimmy came into town. You know him and Jimmy had the infamous practice in Minnesota.”

Towns and Butler played together in Minnesota from 2017 to 2018, when Towns was in his early 20s. Butler asked for a trade out of the Timberwolves because of his frustrations with Towns and Andrew Wiggins. After requesting a trade, Butler famously returned to the practice facility and played with the reserves and led them to a win over Towns, Wiggins, and the other starters while criticizing their mental toughness. Butler was eventually traded to the Sixers, before later signing with the Heat in 2019. Ironically, Wiggins was recently sent to Miami as part of the trade that sent Butler to the Warriors. 

Towns missed Tuesday’s game because he was at the funeral of Sarah Holtzman, a close friend of his girlfriend, Jordyn Woods. 

“They always question how your knees feel and all that but they never question how you’re doing,” Towns told reporters Thursday. “So this is one of those moments where I had to be there for my family and be there for the kids that lost somebody really special to them.”

After the Warriors defeated the Nets on Thursday, Green was told the reason for Towns’s absence. And he didn’t really try to walk back his comments. 

“That’s unfortunate, I’m sorry to hear that. That sucks,” Green said. “But my comments that I made were, you know, ‘People, what I heard was this.’ That’s what I heard. So I do send my well wishes to him and his family.

“It’s inevitable, we all experience death in one way or another, and we’ll all experience it in the same way one day. So it’s unfortunate, you never wish that on anybody, but The Draymond Green Show with Baron Davis must go on.”

The Volume, which produces Green’s podcast, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.