Cody Zeller is lucky that Jusuf Nurkic was in a good mood when the former elbowed the latter in the jaw/face area while boxing out for a rebound. If the two of them had any amount of animosity between them, perhaps as a result of some trash talk earlier in the game, Zeller would have received anything from a shove (in the best-case scenario) to a caved-in skull courtesy of Nurkic’s gigantic Bosnian fist (the worst-case scenario).
Nurkic is wise enough to not get into physical confrontations because he knows that any damage he inflicts on another player would be vastly more devastating than any damage he could receive from the littlekins who surround him on a daily basis. No matter who the aggressor or who was at fault, Nurkic would come away looking like the big bully because he’s indestructible and huge.
Your pal DTB has never been in a physical, man-on-man punching fight before, so he doesn’t know how he would fare in a theoretical contest against Nurkic. But we can guess. The fight would last approximately ten seconds, I would kick Nurkic one time, aiming for his testiculars but actually connecting on his shin, and then he would hit me and it would be lights out. Cue an expensive ambulance ride (gotta love America) where panicked paramedics, having never seen such irrevocably smashed facial bones, take my phone out of my pocket and add a bunch of facial reconstruction surgeons to my contact list. When I come to, I tell the nurses that I got run over by a snowmobile (something that happens unexpectedly often here in Wisconsin), but they show me a video that was uploaded to WorldStarHipHop that depicts me getting headshotted by Nurkic’s fist. I think that’s how it would go down.