Going into this game, I was pretty sure that one or both of Montrezl Harrell and Jusuf Nurkic was going to leave the arena in a bodybag. That’s a center matchup with simply way too much beefed-out intensity, and you know neither of those dudes is ever going to back down. They’re not really the fighting types (Serge Ibaka says hi, with his fists), so I wasn’t expecting them to throw hands at center court or anything, but I figured that the repeated hard impacts on their respective bodies would eventually cause their internal organs to shut down, quickly followed by termination of life processes. I mean, that’s what would happen to me if I was tasked with guarding one of them. I’d take one shoulder to the chest, and that would be it. No more DownToBuck, except as a decomposing corpse in a box in the ground.
But, given the lack of news articles on the subject, it’s safe to say that both combatants made it out of the game alive and (relatively) uninjured. The news media would definitely be all over a case of an NBA player dying during a game due to the (in this specific case) brutal style of play, and all my searches like “Montrezl Harrell dead” and “Jusuf Nurkic memorial service date” and “NBA obituaries” have turned up nothing relevant.
I don’t want to say who came out ahead in the matchup, because I haven’t watched the full game yet, but Harrell did score more points (barely), grabbed more offensive rebounds (barely), and hit more threes (by a lot) so if he didn’t win the battle, at least it was very close. And I’m ignoring the actual outcome of the game here. It’s not Harrell’s fault that no one else on the team plays with even close to the same amount of intensity that he does.