Marcus Smart Suspended Three Games for Punching Charles Bassey: What It Means for the 9-3 Rockets
The NBA suspended Marcus Smart three games without pay on Thursday for throwing a punch that connected with Charles Bassey’s face. James Jones, the league’s executive vice president and head of basketball operations, announced the decision.
The punch came Wednesday night at Toyota Center with 21 seconds left in the third quarter of Houston’s 115-108 win over Golden State. Smart was hit with a Flagrant Foul 2, which carries an automatic ejection. Crew chief Mitchell Ervin said the call was for “contact to the nose.”
Three games is a real number for a swing at someone’s head. The league was never going to go lighter on a player with Smart’s file.
Houston Loses Its Best Perimeter Defender for a Week
Smart misses Friday’s home game against Utah, Sunday’s trip to Washington and Monday’s game in Miami. All three opponents are under .500, which is the kindest possible version of this for a Rockets team sitting 9-3 and third in the Western Conference.
The Associated Press put the lost salary at roughly $125,500. Smart signed with Houston in July on a two-year, $13 million deal, which still looks like one of the better value contracts on a roster built to win now.
Houston will survive three games against bad teams. The real question is whether a 32-year-old guard in his 13th season can keep himself available in April.
The Two Accounts Do Not Match
Ime Udoka relayed Smart’s version after the game. “He said they got wrapped up, and his elbow that he had hurt got bent up,” Udoka said. “So he said something to him, and Bassey said, ‘What you going to do?’ And he did it.”
Bassey told it differently. “He’s been playing dirty the whole game, man,” the Warriors center said. “Bro, he grabbed my knees.” He also called it “fake toughness” and said, “This is a grown man’s league.”
No penalty, ejection or fine for Bassey has been reported, and the league’s release makes no finding about what he did first. Smart has not spoken publicly about it. Both of those things are worth stating plainly rather than filling in.
This Is Not New Behavior
CBS Sports counted 12 ejections and nine fines across Smart’s career before Wednesday, plus two prior suspensions. In March 2015, Boston lost him for one game for hitting Spurs forward Matt Bonner in the groin. In April 2021 he got another single game for directing threatening language at an official.
The fines run longer. He was docked $50,000 in 2019 for shoving Joel Embiid and $35,000 last December for an obscene gesture toward a referee.
Smart built a career on being the guy nobody wanted to play against, and he won Defensive Player of the Year doing it. The edge is the product. It also means the league office has a thick folder on him, and thick folders turn one-game suspensions into three-game suspensions.
Houston Can Afford This Once
Golden State had an eight-game winning streak snapped Wednesday and lost Stephen Curry to an abdominal injury in the same game. The Warriors are 8-4 and sixth in the West, and Bassey, a 7.6-point, 5.7-rebound reserve big, is not their biggest concern this week.
Smart is eligible to return Wednesday. If he wants to be on the floor in May, the next version of “what you going to do” has to end with him walking away.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
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