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Warriors star Draymond Green latest athlete to join CNN as contributor

Ryan Young
·Staff writer
·2-min read

CNN picked up yet another prominent professional athlete as a contributor on Friday afternoon.

CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper announced on his show on Friday that current Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green will be joining the network as its newest contributor.

Green is the latest active professional athlete to join the news network in recent months. New Orleans Saints safety Malcolm Jenkins was hired in June.

The 30-year-old just wrapped up his eighth season in the league with the Warriors, which marked the first time in five seasons that they didn’t make the NBA Finals. Green is also an NBA analyst for TNT, whose parent company owns CNN.

Green addresses NBA walkouts, return to play

Green kicked off his first appearance as a contributor with the network talking about the current state of the NBA — which is set to resume its postseason on Saturday after a walkout earlier this week in response to the Jacob Blake shooting in Wisconsin.

Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot in the back several times by Kenosha, Wisconsin, police as he tried to get into his car and has been left partially paralyzed. The shooting sparked the league-wide strike, which quickly spread out into the rest of the sports world, and widespread condemnation and protests.

Green — whose team did not get invited to the NBA’s bubble at Walt Disney World — told Tapper that he thought it was “very important” for the playoffs to resume.

“Put it in terms of a concert when a performer is on the stage, if you’re sitting in the nosebleeds, the only way you can hear that performer is because they have a microphone and they’re on a stage,” Green said. “If we leave our stage and we drop our microphone, we can no longer speak for those people that we are speaking for, which are parts of our community that their voices aren’t heard. I think it’s extremely important that we continue to speak for them.”

Golden State Warriors forward Draymond Green
Draymond Green addressed the NBA’s decision to resume the playoffs on CNN Friday, saying he thought that move was critical to their social justice movement. (Ezra Shaw/Getty Images)

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