Danny Green, triumphant 3-time NBA champion, calls it a career

Danny Green, the talented shooting guard who achieved NCAA championship success at North Carolina and went on to play a key role in three NBA championship-winning teams, officially announced his retirement from professional basketball on Thursday.

Green won NBA titles with San Antonio in 2014, Toronto in 2019 and the Los Angeles Lakers in 2020, and was a starter on all three of those clubs. He averaged 8.7 points over parts of 15 pro seasons.

“I’m officially moving on from the game of basketball and the NBA,” Green said on his YouTube channel. “It’s been a great run. I’m very proud to be able to walk away from the game. I’m at peace with it. I wasn’t at first, but I think it’s one of those things — once I turned 37, the body started reacting a little differently.”

Green retires with 1,577 3-pointers, 43rd-most in NBA history. He’s one of only 12 players to make that many 3-pointers and shoot at least 40% from beyond the arc.

He’s also ninth in postseason 3-pointers, with 315 of those.

“My body was letting me know. I was getting little calf strains here and there,” Green said. “But also, when you get older, teams aren’t calling as much. Unfortunately, my services weren’t as sought-after as they were when I was younger. It’s been a hell of a ride.”

It also might have been called an unexpected ride.

Green is one of only four players — Kyle Korver, Rashard Lewis and Trevor Ariza are the others — to make as many 3-pointers as he did without being a first-round draft pick. Green was the 46th overall pick in the 2009 draft by Cleveland, which wound up waiving him after one season.

Green was eventually signed by San Antonio and became a starter there for seven seasons, helping the Spurs win a title in 2014. He was traded to Toronto as part of the Kawhi Leonard deal, was a starter on the Raptors team that won a title in 2019 and was a starter again on the Lakers team that won a title in the pandemic season of 2020.

“People ask me, ‘How did you learn how to become a winner? How do you become a leader?’” Green said. “And it’s the people before me, the people that have taught me, my coaches. They prepared me to be successful because ultimately I’m just a normal kid. I had some height, but I was not freakishly athletic. I just worked very hard, and I had the good resources around me to learn how to be professional and do things the right way.”

He tore his ACL and LCL when teammate Joel Embiid fell on him during Philadelphia’s season-ending playoff loss to Miami in May 2022, and appeared in only 17 more games — four of them playoff games — in the next two seasons.

Green said he’s hoping to work in media and indicated that he has some opportunities to consider.

“I’m excited for the next chapter, the next journey,” Green said.