If you can't beat them then maybe try to beat them up?
With his Phoenix Suns not having any luck stopping Blake Griffin at actual basketball on Monday night, forward P.J. Tucker seemed to try a few MMA moves during a scrap in the fourth quarter.
The high-flying Los Angeles Clippers All-Star scored 37 points in his latest dominant performance but was embroiled in an ugly incident in the fourth quarter with Tucker. The pair became entangled in the paint while battling for a rebound and both players ended up on the floor. Tucker appeared to throw a punch or an elbow at Griffin and was ejected after officials reviewed the play.
After the incident, Phoenix Suns coach Jeff Hornacek said Griffin started the fracas by tackling Tucker.
“He got tackled," Hornacek said of Tucker, via Paul Coro of AZCentral.com. "I don’t even know how the foul was on him. He was standing there and Blake takes him to the ground and rolls on top of him and he just tries to get him off.”
In the home locker room at Stapes Center, Clippers coach Doc Rivers seemed to hold a different view of Griffin's culpability.
“Blake gets hit as much as anybody in the league and I think we've all seen it,” Rivers said after his team's 112-105 win at Staples Center, reported Broderick Turner of the L.A. Times. "It gets old."
Regardless of who was at fault on the play, it would have been understandable if Tucker and the Suns felt that watching Griffin make baskets had gotten old by that point.
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