For fans, the NBA on Christmas is comfort food, jerseys and wrapping paper, a national daylong slate that turns living rooms into arenas.
For Draymond Green, it’s something else entirely: a workday that arrives with a smile for the cameras and a price tag that rarely makes the highlight packages.
“Playing on Christmas Day ‘fu**ing’ sucks,” Green said, laying out the part players usually sand down in public. “Number 1, it can affect your mood. Number 2, we are human beings and enjoy Christmas Day with our families… No one works on Christmas Day.”
Draymond says playing on Christmas Day ‘fu**ing’ sucks 😳
“Number 1, it can affect your mood. Number 2, we are human beings and enjoy Christmas Day with our families… No one works on Christmas Day.”
(via @DraymondShow, h/t @NBA__Courtside)pic.twitter.com/3AKDshtedH
— Legion Hoops (@LegionHoops) December 29, 2025
Green’s frustration isn’t aimed at the concept of marquee basketball, it’s aimed at the myth that the day itself is an honor for the people clocking in. That myth is powerful because the NBA has spent decades turning Dec. 25 into a pillar of its identity. The league has played Christmas games since 1947, in the NBA’s second season, and, with the lone exception of 1998 due to the lockout, it’s been an annual tradition ever since.
In 2025, the holiday showcase again came packaged as a full five-game marathon: Cavaliers–Knicks, Spurs–Thunder, Mavericks–Warriors, Rockets–Lakers, and Timberwolves–Nuggets, stretched across ABC and ESPN windows built for maximum attention.
That attention is the whole point, and it’s also what Green is pushing back on. The league sells Christmas as a stage. Players feel it as a schedule. Travel, routines, shootarounds, tipoff times, postgame media, security lines, hotel rooms, and the quiet reality that “family time” often becomes a FaceTime call squeezed between obligations. Green’s argument isn’t complicated. It’s human: this is the one day most people are allowed to treat as sacred, and NBA players are asked to treat it like a Tuesday.
He’s also not pretending the platform is meaningless. In related comments reported this week, Green acknowledged the split reality: as an NBA player, you want the spotlight; as a person, the holiday can still feel wrong.
That tension has always been the real story behind the Christmas slate. The games matter, the ratings matter, the tradition matters, and the players’ lives matter, too. Green’s bluntness forces the league’s most sentimental day to be viewed without the soft-focus filter. Not as a cozy seasonal ritual, but as labor, performed at the exact moment the rest of the country is told to log off.
