Knicks' Mike Brown on no punishment for Wemby: 'The league's going to do what they're going to do'
Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama during media day at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
The NBA decided not to take action after reviewing Victor Wembanyama’s shove of Jalen Brunson and while Knicks coach Mike Brown had little to say about the decision, he did warn what it could lead to by the inaction.
The play in Game 3 Monday went viral after Brunson attempted to set a screen on Wembanyama and he was grabbed behind the neck and head and shoved to the ground. The NBA’s head of officiating Monty McCutchen said on ESPN that a foul should have been called, but was missed. But the NBA opted not to retroactively give Wembanyama a technical foul or a flagrant foul.
And Brown warned that without the NBA taking care of it, there is always the possibility that the players take it into their own hands and retaliate.
“You always have to talk to your team about those situations,” Brown said. “Not only do you talk to your team, which I did, but I talked to the officials, too. I said stuff like that can cause a fight. Obviously, they didn't see it. There were other things. But those are things that I was talking about. At the end of the day, hopefully, like I said before, the officials will be consistent with what they see on both ends of the floor, not just with us but with them, too, and you get a good ballgame out of it.”
Wembanyama is hardly known as a dirty player, but he did get a flagrant 2 and an ejection in the opening round series against Minnesota when he threw an elbow to the neck of Naz Reid. In Game 2 of this series he was boxed out aggressively by Knicks backup point guard Jose Alvarado and wrapped him up around the shoulders and spun him away, with no foul called on that play either.
“That was part of it, what I was saying [in his comments Monday night about the officiating]” Brown said. “If there's something we did, call it; something they did, call it. The play is what is. Hopefully if it happens in the future, fingers crossed, the officials see it and call it. Again, it's out of my control. The officials are human. They're going to miss stuff. You hope that they miss stuff for both teams. But they're going to miss stuff. Like I say, at the end of the day the league is the league. You got to live with it. I am nothing, and my opinion is nothing when it comes to that type of stuff, in their eyes. That's how it should be.”
After Monday’s game, Brown pointed to the discrepancy in free throws — 24 to 8 in favor of San Antonio in the second half of Game 3 — and felt that the game was not being called equally. He didn’t deny that the Knicks fouls were legitimate, but felt that the Knicks were getting fouled, too, and not getting the calls, and it made a difference as San Antonio won that game to close to within two games to one in the series.
“Hey, the league's going to do what they're going to do,” he said. “They ain't going to listen to me. They ain't going to listen to nobody else. I said my piece on what I said after the game two days ago. You just hope at the end of the day everything is consistent on both ends throughout the whole game. That's it. It is what it is.”
Steve Popper covers the Knicks for Newsday. He has spent nearly three decades covering the Knicks and the NBA, along with just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
