With about five minutes remaining in the first quarter of Game 3 of the NBA Finals, Spurs star Victor Wembanyama’s shoved Knicks standout Jalen Brunson hard to the ground in a play that resulted in no foul call on the floor. However, NBA Senior Vice President and Head of Development and Training for Referee Operations Monty McCutchen admitted Tuesday that the play should have been whistled as a foul.
“Well, most certainly I think we can all agree that a foul was missed on that play,” McCutchen said on ESPN’s NBA Today. “A big part of our job is on-ball, off-ball exchanges between referees. We did a poor job of that here, where we’ve got two people on ball and we don’t see the screening action. Lots of fighting over screens throughout the game. And if we break down in our fundamentals in even the smallest amounts, we have the opportunity to miss a clear foul as we missed here.”
Despite McCutchen’s comments, the league said Tuesday night that Wembanyama’s shove on Brunson will not be upgraded to a flagrant foul.
The play itself came with a bit less than five minutes remaining in the first quarter. Josh Hart took the ball up the court, and Brunson was fighting for position with Wembanyama just above the free-throw line. After about a second of physical contact between the two, Wembanyama can be seen shoving Brunson by the head into the ground.
If it had been upgraded to a flagrant foul, it could have had significant ramifications on the rest of the series. When a player accumulates four flagrant foul points in a single postseason, he is automatically suspended for one game. Wembanyama currently has two flagrant foul points, both accumulated on a single play. In the second round against the Timberwolves, he received a flagrant-2 foul and was ejected for elbowing Naz Reid in the neck.
If the play with Brunson was upgraded to a flagrant-1, Wembanyama would have been just one flagrant foul away from an automatic suspension. It would have undoubtedly affected the physicality he could play with for the rest of the Finals. Instead, he remains at two flagrant foul points heading into Wednesday night’s Game 4.
While suspensions resulting from players hitting the four-flagrant foul point threshold in the postseason are rare, they do happen. Most notably, Draymond Green was suspended for Game 5 of the 2016 NBA Finals after accumulating four flagrant foul points throughout that postseason, culminating in his absence in a key loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers that eventually led to the first-ever 3-1 Finals comeback at Golden State’s expense.
Wembanyama’s propensity for hard fouls has come under increased scrutiny this postseason, particularly since that elbow to Reid’s neck. In Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, he appeared to pull Lu Dort’s hair while running up the court.
In Game 2 of the NBA Finals, Wembanyama can be seen tossing Knicks backup point guard Jose Alvarado by the neck while fighting for rebounding position following a Dylan Harper layup attempt.
Simply put, the Spurs need Wembanyama on the court. Though the Spurs went 12-6 in the regular season without Wembanyama and they won Game 3 of their first-round series against the Portland Trail Blazers without him, things have only gotten harder as the competition has improved deeper into the postseason.
When Wembanyama was ejected against Minnesota, the Spurs lost Game 4 to the Timberwolves. He has not missed a game in the last two rounds, but the minutes that he rests have become very precarious. In the Western Conference Finals, the Spurs were outscored by 38 points with backup center Luke Kornet on the floor. Thus far in the NBA Finals, the Knicks have won Kornet’s minutes by 17 points.
Beyond even backup center, the Spurs only seem to fully trust six players in this series: Wembanyama, Stephon Castle, De’Aaron Fox, Harper, Devin Vassell and Julian Champagnie. Removing Wembanyama from the equation would force San Antonio to lean even more heavily into bench players who have lost prominence as the postseason has progressed. But Tuesday night’s decision by the NBA eases any concerns that Wembanyama won’t be on the court due to disciplinary reasons.
Though he was focused more on the free-throw disparity, Knicks coach Mike Brown shared his frustrations with the officials following New York’s Game 3 loss. “I never thought I would be in the NBA Finals and see a team get 24 free-throw attempts in the second half to another team’s eight,” Brown said Monday night.
When asked about the shove from Wembanyama, Brunson refused to add fuel to the fire. “Whatever you saw is what you saw,” he said.
While the verdict on the Wembanyama-Brunson play did not change, other calls in this series have been adjusted. Mitchell Robinson’s Game 2 technical foul, received for a bit of shoving with Wembanyama, was rescinded on Saturday. A change here would have been far more consequential.
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