I don’t really know what Elfrid Payton did in that end-game skirmish to get ejected, but he must have done something, because he definitely wasn’t in the game or on the bench after that point. I keep rewatching the “fight” and I’m not seeing anything particularly egregious. Maybe he concealed an improvised shiv made from a sharpened plastic toothbrush in his shorts and then stabbed someone with it real quick without the cameras catching it? If he did that, I think a suspension would be in order, but I’m just speculating.
Maybe he accidentally hit a referee with his hair.
But don’t let his ejection distract you from the fact that he got ANOTHER triple-double with the Suns, his second of the year, with many more to come. Assuming he stays with the Suns, which isn’t likely but whatever. I’m going to take a moment to advocate again for my weighted system for allocating assists where good players generate fractions of an assist and bad ones generate multiples. Like, he dimed T.J. Warren a bunch, which is fine, but Warren is so good that those assists should only count for a third of an assist. Recalculating things takes away his triple-double, because his assist for a Bender triple doesn’t replace all the Warren layups, but it’s still a good passing performance.