Draymond, Durant pull out the stops to put away Anthony Davis' Pelicans

Last month, after coming up with a clutch steal of an inbounds pass to shut down the Milwaukee Bucks’ last chance at score and seal a victory, Draymond Green put the NBA on notice.

“I think that’s disrespectful to me,” the Golden State Warriors’ firebrand forward said. “I take that as disrespect. Don’t go at me for game.”

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A week later, after snuffing out Dennis Schröder and Kent Bazemore to lock down another win, Green again snarled about teams and pundits testing him.

“People counted our defense out with [Andrew] Bogut leaving,” he said. “That kind of pisses me off.”

Evidently, former Warriors assistant Alvin Gentry didn’t get the memo.

With 13.4 seconds left in the fourth quarter, New Orleans Pelicans guard Jrue Holiday missed the back half of a pair of free throws that would have drawn his team within one point of the visiting Warriors, only to see teammate E’Twaun Moore come away with the offensive rebound to give the Pelicans the chance to tie or take the lead with just under 10 ticks left in regulation. New Orleans swung the ball around to its top dog, giving superstar Anthony Davis the rock and trusting that he could continue torching Golden State as he had all night en route to 28 points, eight rebounds, five blocks, three assists and two steals. There was just one problem: Green was right there waiting for him on the left block.

“I knew he wanted to drive left,” Green said after the game, according to ESPN.com’s Ethan Sherwood Strauss. “That’s always when he’s on that block. He probably go left 85 percent of the time on that block. So I knew he wanted to go that way.”

As soon as Davis pivoted to face the basket, Green pounced, swiping his right hand into AD’s pocket and knocking the ball free. Davis instantly threw his hands up in anger, wondering why Green hadn’t been called for a foul. While he was doing that, Green was corralling the loose ball and forcing New Orleans to foul him to extend the game, turning the final two seconds into a free-throw exhibition that ended with the Warriors on top, 113-109, to cap a 4-1 road trip with their 10th straight win over the Pelicans and their 13th in 14 meetings with New Orleans since Steve Kerr came to Golden State at the start of the 2014-15 campaign.

The typically mild-mannered Davis blew his stack at Green getting away without a call on the play, whether for what he felt was contact on the reach-in swipe or for having two hands on the Brow’s back as he gathered the ball in the mid-post, resulting in a technical foul. (For what it’s worth, Stephen Curry missed the technical free throw, which probably had at least a few Pelicans fans invoking our site’s name from their couches.)

Davis might have also been working out some frustration that carried over from the Pelicans’ previous possession:

Down three with just under 45 seconds to go, Davis and Holiday worked a dribble handoff above the 3-point line that triggered a Warriors switch, putting Klay Thompson on the All-Star power forward as he rolled to the basket. Holiday slipped a bounce pass through to Davis, who had a step on Thompson and seemed set to score a basket for a bucket that would draw New Orleans within one. Instead, though, Kevin Durant exploded from the weak side to reject Davis’ layup attempt, come up with the loose ball while lying on the ground, and get the ball to Green to save possession before pumping his fist from his seat.

“That whole possession, I was telling myself I wanted to make a huge play,” Durant said after the game. “I was excited I was able to get over there and help the team out in another way besides making a shot. It was definitely fun. I was in the moment.”

It was Durant’s second block of the night and his 43rd of the season, which is tied for ninth-most in the NBA. Opponents are now shooting just 41.2 percent at the basket when Durant’s defending on the play, the second-best mark in the league among players who face at least four up-close shots per game. Those of us who asked before the season who would protect the rim for Golden State now that Andrew Bogut and Festus Ezeli are gone have gotten our answer; it’s the guy who replaced Harrison Barnes, the guy who also calmly drops 27 on 10-for-19 shooting and comfortably pulls up from a county away. Makes sense, when you think about it; after all, even he’s finally admitting he’s a 7-footer these days.

Whatever the source of Davis’ frustration, his pleading was unsuccessful, as Green logged his fourth steal of the night on the biggest play of the game — a play many defenders might not have the audacity to attempt, but one that Green made without hesitation because he knows Golden State’s firepower gives him the leeway to take risks.

“We were up two,” Green explained after the game. “We’ve got three of the greatest scorers in the world [in Durant, Thompson and Stephen Curry, who led all scorers with 30 points and seven assists]. So if I foul … the way I look at it is, defense is my side of the basketball, that I have to try to make everything happen on. Offense is their side of the basketball, where they’ve got to make something happen. We up two points. If I foul, he gotta make two free throws. If he make two free throws, it’s on them to go score the ball.

“Come up with the steal?” Green continued with a smile. “I made their job a little easier. That’s the way I look at it.”

Come up with the steal he did — and, he maintains, he got all ball in the process.

“Yeah, it was definitely clean,” Green said. “I hit the ball as he was trying to throw his shoulder into me, and that’s what happened.”

It was another game-tilting stop to add to Green’s eventual “for your consideration” reel come Defensive Player of the Year voting time, and a fitting capper to another night that saw Draymond put his fingerprints all over the game despite not scoring in bunches.

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Green finished with 12 points on 4-for-12 shooting, 12 rebounds, 10 assists, four steals and two blocks in 36 minutes of play, logging his first triple-double of the season and the 15th of his career. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, that’s the third-most in the NBA since Green entered the league in 2012-13, behind only Russell Westbrook (44) and Rajon Rondo (16), and the Warriors have won every game in which Green’s hit his numbers.

It’s a disappointing loss for a Pelicans team that got big nights from Davis and reserve guard Langston Galloway (20 points, five rebounds, three steals off the bench), knocked in 14 3-pointers as a team and controlled the game for much of the first half. Poor shooting and turnovers doomed them in the final seven minutes, though, as Gentry’s club came up short for the sixth time in seven games to fall to within one game of the Western Conference’s basement.

“It comes down to making plays at the end,” Gentry said after the game. “They made a couple of shots and a couple of plays and we didn’t. In a game like that you have to step up and be the team to make the stop and make the shots. They were able to do it and we weren’t.”

On the deciding play of this night, as it’s been on a lot of nights, the difference for the Warriors was that they had Draymond Green, and the other guys didn’t.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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