Draymond Green Scored 4 Points Last Night And Got A Triple-Double Anyway

About a year ago, we published a blog asking for someone to name the rare stat line that Draymond Green had pulled off multiple times that season—a triple-double with perfect shooting from the field.

Draymond did not have that kind of triple-double last night. Instead, he did something far more interesting, if not quite something better. With 12 rebounds, 10 assists, 10 steals, 5 blocks and 4 points, he became the first player in NBA history to record a triple-double with single-digit scoring.

In a Warriors win over the Grizzlies, Green was 2-for-6 from the floor overall and 0-for-3 from three-point range. He didn’t make it to the free-throw line once. But he managed to put together a highlight reel and look pretty damn dominant nonetheless:

As historically interesting as his box score already is, it would have been far more so if he’d managed to put up just one more point. Had he scored 5 points last night, Green would have had a 5x5 line, which is a pretty exclusive feat in and of itself—it’s happened just 16 times since 1983, which is as far back as Basketball-Reference’s data goes here. But Draymond’s already done it once, one of only two active players who can claim as much. By doing it twice, which he would have pulled off with just one more point last night, he would have become just the third player to put up a 5x5 multiple times. (The other two are Hakeem Olajuwon and Andrei Kirilenko, and as a somewhat unsurprising but still kind of astounding aside, Hakeem’s lead on this statistic is ridiculous: 6 of the 16 box scores with a 5x5 are his.)

A triple-double generally works better as an entertaining box-score storytelling piece than as a significant measure in and of itself. This one definitely qualifies.