Reporter Who Asked Draymond Green That Odd Question About The Houston Floods Gets Fired

After the Warriors beat the Rockets in Game 4 on Sunday, a reporter started to ask Draymond Green a strange question about the connection between the floods in Houston and his team’s performance when Green stopped him and went off on the guy for over a minute. Green said that the reporter had tried to ask him the same question at practice the day before, and he was finally fed up enough with the strange, seemingly insensitive question that he let the poor guy have it.

According to CSN’s Henry Wofford, that man who asked Green the question was a first-year reporter based in Houston working for a Chinese publication. Wofford didn’t name him, but did note that he was fired shortly after the Green’s retort got picked up all over the internet.

We don’t know exactly what the reporter’s full question to Green was. It sure appears he was winding up to a question that would have trivialized the devastating floods into a framing device for a cutesy inquiry about the correlation between natural disasters and the Warriors winning. That’s not good, but I’m also not sure it’s as purposefully insidious as Green took it to be. The reporter is not a native English speaker, and he could have had some trouble framing his question with the nuance he wanted to.

Postgame pressers are their own sort of spectacle in the NBA playoffs, and the foreign press gets to ask their questions, the same as anyone. It’s a gesture of good faith that the NBA allows reporters from all around the world to participate, and you’ll inevitably get some questions from reporters whose first language isn’t English. This guy asking an odd question is probably a translation error more than anything, and firing him for that seems overly harsh.