It’s a unique triangle in professional basketball, a sport known for its mystical triangles and the idea of three as a magic number. Current Golden State Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr played three seasons with the Chicago Bulls and troublemaker Dennis Rodman, and he now coaches current NBA “bad boy” Draymond Green. We’ve always suspected this is why Kerr has put up with Green’s antics for so long: wins.

Kerr’s best two seasons as a player came in the championship seasons of 1996 and 1997 for the Bulls, who were obviously led by Michael Jordan. Kerr’s combined 15.8 Win Shares in those two seasons played a huge part in the Bulls’ 141 regular-season wins in those two seasons—as did Rodman’s 12.2 WS for those two years put together. While Jordan was winning MVP awards, Kerr and Rodman were key role players …

But important ones: Kerr remains the all-time career NBA leader for three-point shot percentage, in fact, thanks to those three seasons in Chicago where he hit 46.4 percent of his downtown shots, higher than his career mark. Meanwhile, Rodman did his thing, leading the NBA in rebounds all three seasons with the Bulls and also playing tough defense. There’s no way the Bulls pull off three straight titles without Rodman.

And that brings us to Green, who serves as the “Rodman” to the Warriors’ “Jordan”: Stephen Curry. There’s no need to compare Curry to Jordan here, other than nothing they’re the two leaders of two different NBA dynasties from different eras of play. But basketball hasn’t changed too much fundamentally despite the modern-day game’s reliance on the three pointer: teams still need to rebound and play defense to win.

Green isn’t Rodman, in terms of rebounding prowess: Rodman averaged 15.3 rpg with Chicago, while Green has averaged a mere 6.9 rpg during his 11-plus seasons with the Warriors. But Green is a similar player to Rodman in the sense he does a lot of the dirty work a team needs under the basket to win: Rodman’s .140 WS/48 mark with the Bulls is comparable to Green’s .127 WS/48 mark with Golden State, for example.

Of course, we’re looking at the Worm in his late prime for only three seasons in comparison to Day-Day’s entire career, so it’s not a fair measurement, but it makes the point for us: Green has averaged 5.6 apg, 1.3 spg, and 1.0 bpg to go along with his 8.7 ppg, providing an all-around reliability for the Curry Era Warriors that is similar to Rodman’s reliability for the Jordan Era Bulls (2.8 apg, 5.2 ppg)—different yet similar.

The personalities and the toughness within them, though, are the strongest connectors between Rodman and Green. We know Kerr saw this firsthand in Chicago and understood its necessity to keep opponents honest when it came to roughing up Jordan the way Rodman and the Detroit Pistons—the original Bad Boys—did in the late 1980s. Nobody was going to mess wit Jordan with Rodman lurking nearby, right?

It goes without saying the same goes for Green and the relatively fragile Curry, who has missed 241 of a possible 1,136 games since entering the NBA so long ago. For the record, Jordan missed just 71 games through his age-34 season, while playing in 930 games between 1984-1998. He needed less protecting than Curry, for sure, which does a lot to explain why Green’s temperament is “worse” than Rodman’s mindset.

Still, Kerr gets it, and we don’t think he will ever sever ties with Green while Curry is on the roster—unless Draymond forces the issue, which we’re pretty sure he won’t. He may be hot headed, but Green is not stupid. He has a very high basketball IQ, which was noticeable even his first season in college (2008-2009). The Warriors’ bad boy is understood plenty by his coach, who won three rings with an original Bad Boy in tow.