Post-skirmish comments
November 13th, 2008, 1:16 am · Post a Comment · posted by jerrybrown
As you might guess, most of the postgame chatter revolved around the Matt Barnes-Rafer Alston confrontation. Here’s what the principles had to say:
Rafer Alston: “He (Barnes) just took a cheap shot at me. If you look at the replay, the ref is standing there watching it. It was a dirty play, he raised his arm. Good thing he didn’t connect and knock my teeth out. I was just setting a screen, we were trying to get two for one (shots to end the period). I was setting a screen for Mac (Tracy McGrady) so he could come off and get a good shot. I don’t know if he was frustrated by his game or their game or whatever was going on, but there was no call for that. There was no call for my reaction really, but sometimes when someone goes at you like that, you just react.
Tracy McGrady: “I really don’t know. I just saw my teammate get into it and (Steve) Nash ran up and I was just defending my guy and the next thing I knew, I was on top of him. The big fellah pushed the heck out of me. It’s basketball, it happens. After that we just went back to playing. A big thing for us is we kept our composure and won this ball game”
Matt Barnes: “It was just a bunch of pushing. I set a hard screen and he didn’t like it. They had a couple of hard screens on us. I saw them hit Steve with a pick The refs had to take control of the game. They thought throwing us out of the game would do it.”
We’ve run into each other a couple of times before. Nothing like that. We’re both competitors. He plays hard, I play hard. When people play hard there is bound to be some ruckus sometimes
(Did the play warrant ejections?) “I thought you had to throw a punch to get kicked out of a game. All I did was push him and he pushed me. T-Mac pushed Steve all the way to the ground and didn’t get kicked out. That’s just how it goes. A rough night all the way around and we look forward to playing them again the next time we see them.
“We definitely have each other’s back on this team. That’s something I learned from day one on this team. It was drawn out a little longer after Steve got pushed down, but it was good to see everyone got each other’s back. That’s how you build a team.”
Steve Nash: “(Alston) ran at Matt and so I tried to get in there and help Matt and make sure he wasn’t getting hammered over there and try to defuse the situation and I got pushed to the ground. It happened really quickly.”
Shaquille O’Neal, a late arrival to the festivities who cleared everyone out one by one at the end: “It was just a shoving match. I saw somebody push my brother Steve (Nash) and so I came to his aid. It wasn’t anything good.”
When someone made the observation that he moved a whole pile of players when he arrived on the scene, O’Neal said “That’s what I do. Move piles.”
