Charmin Soft

Kevin Durant's (alleged) bodyguard stepping in to break up a fight with PJ Tucker is proof the NBA has gone soft

June 11, 2021

Game three of the Bucks-Nets Eastern Conference semifinal happened last night, with Milwaukee striking back after two losses on the road, but the weirdest moment came in the third quarter after a very obvious foul by P.J. Tucker on a Kevin Durant jumper. Watch:

On the surface, this is just another one of those NBA quarter-fights, with a lot of jawing, maybe a soft shove or two, and a lot of teammates holding people back. So we have to ask: What the hell was the so-called "security guard" doing on the floor? Aren't they there to protect the players from fans, rather than each other? I mean, this is a league where less than 20 years ago Alonzo Mourning dragged Jeff Van Gundy around the floor like a dishrag and nobody really did anything about it.

Draymond Green, for one, thinks we've all gone soft:

He goes on like that for a while. He's kinda right, but also, if you look at the original video above, at around the 44-second mark, you'll notice that one of the "security guards" actually shoves Tucker. So not only did he intervene in something that didn't need intervention, but they're actually escalating...to the point that Tucker started yelling at him. Was he a Nets-specific employee, protecting Durant, as some of Twitter claims, or just some Fiserv Forum employee who lost control? Well, according to beat writers there, it was Durant's personal bodyguard!

That's kind of messed up, right? Or at least a very bad precedent? Anyway, it resulted in the bizarre situation of an actual security guard getting between Tucker and Durant's bodyguard, which is just stupid enough to be funny. Things just keep getting weirder and weird in post-COVID sports.