Green, Three-Time Champ with 3 Teams Retires

The ultimate glue guy and 3-point sniper on three championship teams, Danny Green, is hanging up his sneakers after a 15-year NBA career.

“I’m officially moving on from the game of basketball, the NBA. It’s been a great run,” Green said. “To me, I’m very proud to be able to walk away from the game. I’m at peace with it.”

The small forward played for six different teams, the Cleveland Cavaliers, San Antonio Spurs, Toronto Raptors, Los Angeles Lakers, Philadelphia 76ers and Memphis Grizzlies during a career that started in 2009.

Green came into the league as a raw second-round pick who was known for his defense in the 2009 NBA draft out of the University of North Carolina and played his rookie season on the Cavaliers along sided LeBron James.

He remained with Cleveland for just one season and did not establish himself as an impact player until his third year in the league with coach Gregg Popovich and the Spurs. He played in San Antonio for eight seasons, which was his longest chunk of time he spent with any one franchise during his career.

While with the Spurs, he won his first title in 2014 and became a critical secondary playmaker who could take advantage of the spacing that came with playing with the ‘Big Four’, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Kawhi Leonard and Manu Ginóbili.

Green, 37 years-of-age, connected on 39.6 percent of his three-pointers during his time with the Spurs and drilled 45 percent of his triples during the 2014 NBA Finals win over James and the Miami Heat.

He was far from done collecting hardware, as he teamed up with Leonard one more time and won a ring during his lone season north of the border with the Raptors in 2018-19 and then reached the sport’s mountaintop alongside James on the Lakers in 2019-20 in the Orlando Bubble. He famously hit six three-pointers in Toronto’s Game 3 win over the Golden State Warriors during the 2019 NBA Finals.

From there, Green bounced around to the 76ers, Cavaliers again and Grizzlies. He suited up for just 11 games in 2022-23 and two games in 2023-24 as he struggled to fully recover from the torn ACL and LCL he suffered during the 2022 playoffs.

It certainly was not the ‘happy ever after’ and the ending he envisioned, but none the less, Green had an impressive career and averaged 8.7 points, 3.4 rebounds and 1.5 assists per game while shooting 40 percent from the great beyond across his 15 seasons.

As ESPN’s senior NBA insider Shams Charania noted, he is also just one of four players in league history to win championships with three different franchises. It is that postseason success he will likely be best remembered for, as he found a way to maximize his talents as an important role player on several loaded rosters.