Jeff Green, from all the way back to his Georgetown days was a Tin Man. He just needs one thing to make him a superstar. The heart. Or in other words: the desire, the need, the drive.
I'm just not sure that is something anyone can teach. You have it or you don't. His passiveness and lack of consistency to me show that he doesn't have it. He has the tools though. But even the greatest carpenter with the best tools in the world can not build a house if he doesn't have the desire to do so.
That is a purely subjective opinion, reflecting your take on what you have perceived of Jeff Green. And that's fair - you are entitled to it.
But I'm going to respectfully disagree. I have been following Jeff Green's career all the way back to his G-Town days and I just see him completely differently than what you describe here.
I'm not going to assert that Green is this way or that way, because (as I've said many times) I am not a big believer in armchair psychoanalyzing.
But observationally, I do think if you watched him back in Georgetown, I find it hard to believe you would think he 'had no heart'. He was the captain (literally), the leader and the killer, clutch player for that Hoyas team. He made many, big time shots in big games. Man - that win over vanderbilt in the tournament? That was pure ice.
Sticking to basketball, I do know that Green spent the first 4 years of his career forced to play second/third fiddle and out of position - yet was always lauded by teammates and coaches for his locker-room leadership.
There really was not much he could do to break out of the 'third wheel' trap. Would we think more highly of him if he had griped about his utilization? Would that have been showing more 'fire'? Hard to say. I try to stick to what goes on on the court.
In OKC, Green's role on offense boiled down to setting picks and shooting clock-expiring 3s and otherwise watching Westbrook and Durant take a bazillion shots.
Consider: In his last season in OKC, Green took 30% of his shots from 3PT land and only 28% of his shots at the rim (Almost always on fast-breaks. Rarely in half-court plays). Now, Green is a decent 3PT shooter, but that is NOT what you want him to be doing, with his speed and athleticism. You want him at the rim. In OKC, the highest percentage of his shots at the rim he ever took was 33.8% in his rookie year. It declined after that.
In Doc's system, so far this year, he's only taking about 21% of his shots from 3PT range and 35% at the rim.
When he first came here, he barely had time to try to fit in in a tough situation (Perkins trade) - though he did at least play credibly once we got to the playoffs and against Miami that year. I don't think we could expect him to break free of the patterns of deferral that had been beaten into him for 5 years in just those few weeks - especially when joining a team loaded with 3 future HoF players, plus Rondo - in other words loaded with guys way up on the pecking order ahead of him. So he wasn't going to suddenly be the alpha dog. Interestingly though, right off the bat, his 'at rim' share of his shots went up to 39% during that period.
And then he missed an entire year due to heart surgery.
I think expecting him to suddenly come back at 100% AND to have reverted to the alpha dog role he had in college (after 4 years of being conditioned to NOT be the alpha dog) was unrealistic. It takes time to (a) get fully back into NBA condition and (b) un-learn deference developed over several years of playing in a system that under-utlized him.
But to suggest that he 'just doesn't have it in him'? I don't claim to be a psychologist or a mind-reader, but the way he played for the Hoyas in '06 & '07 did not strike me as a someone who has no 'heart'. He _was_ the heart of that team. He's still that guy.
Anyway, we know he has a heart. The doctors worked on it last season.