Draymond Green and Lauri Markkanen discuss fatherhood in the NBA. Markkanen has a five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter, and says playing with his kids after a bad game gives him an emotional reset. He spends off-seasons in Finland and speaks Finnish at home to preserve his heritage for children growing up mostly in the US.
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I can't help but notice that as a family man myself, I've been married now for 6, 7 months, 7 months, 6 months, soon to be 7 months. I have 3 children. Just speak to me, number 1, how many children do you have? And then also what it's like living this NBA life and being a father at the same time, gone for 13 days currently right now. Just talk to me about what it's like being a father and living the world that we live in. Yeah.
Yeah, so I got a wife and a 5-year-old boy and a 2-year-old daughter at home. So I mean, it's everything. It's really helped me to play on this level at the same time. Like, obviously it's tough to be away from family and you want to spend the most time with them, obviously. But just, they understand it's my job and I I respect them for understanding that that requires a lot of time. Just not games and trips, but going in to get treatments and practices and extra work you have to put in. So, but they've really helped me in a way that I was struggling my first couple years. Really my first year, because our son was born my halfway through my rookie year. So—
Wow.
But that—— that already helped me to— I had a problem with separating my non-basketball stuff from basketball. It was— basketball was always just a game I played for fun. And then now it's my job and I'm getting paid for it. So I was in a gray area of kind of, you want to enjoy it, but at the same time you have the pressure to perform. So just being married and having kids, I think he really helped me to separate the two. I have a bad game, it's a bad day at work, I close the locker room door and go play hide and seek with my son, whatever. So that really helped me in my basketball career, kind of enjoying the basketball and whatever happens, good or bad, I go home and it's, it doesn't matter anymore. So that's really helped me and I'm really grateful for that.
Yeah. They walk in that house, they don't care if you won. If you won, you're no bigger of a superstar than if you lost.
Yeah. Yeah, right. They don't care if I miss all my shots or made all of 'em, so.
What's it like? So I'll tell you one of the things I struggle with, and I know we gotta get outta here. I'll tell you one of the things I struggle with as a parent, and it's my own head. Which I can acknowledge. But growing up in Saginaw, Michigan, now you grew up in western Finland, obviously two totally different places, but smaller places in the grand scheme of the world. I always fear my children not understanding the grind, you know, not understanding or appreciating things and not understanding what it's like to be an underdog. I always fear, you know, my kids growing up living the life that they're living. How does that ultimately play out when they're adults? For you, it goes even a step further, whereas I'm still in America, although I'm not in Saginaw, Michigan, still in America. But for you, you actually have to teach your kid an entirely different culture. Mm-hmm. How do you go about that and balancing that to make sure that your kids who are growing up here in America for at least 8 months out of the year, 9 months out of the year, that they understand the Finnish culture, that they speak the language fluently, like how fluently, how do you go about making sure that they get that side of you?
Yeah, it's definitely something you have to think about and, That's pretty much the reason why I spend most of my off-seasons back home in Finland, just to get my kids over there and trying to keep Finland important to them as well. Obviously, their grandparents are there and everybody, so trying to keep it important. Obviously, who knows how long I'm going to play in the NBA, but they're probably teenagers at the time. So it's— It's gonna be a tough decision at the end, like where we're gonna be living, but I just want them to learn and appreciate both sides of it. And obviously you never know what's gonna happen in the future, but so we speak Finnish at home, so that automatically kind of stays with us. So just spending time both places and learning, learning the different cultures and, make him really appreciate both of them, how different they are. And that's the main thing.
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