I feel somewhat guilty for advertising the skirmish Maxi “Maxi Pad” Kleber got into as a “fight”, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s that young males (the NBA’s, and thus my, average viewer demographic) LOVE watching fights. NBA videos purporting to contain footage of NBA players fighting routinely draw the most traffic. This despite the fact that these “fights” are usually little more than a glorified shoving match; only rarely is an actual punch thrown, and even more rarely does an actual punch connect.
I almost think that the NBA would get better ratings if they just forgot about the basketball part completely and had five-on-five brawls between teams. I wouldn’t watch it, but if I was like 10 years younger or so, I totally would.
In this case, Kleber set a hard screen, a really hard screen, he basically drove his shoulder right into Jarrett Allen’s chest, and you know Allen, any bit of contact is going to send him crumpling to the floor because he’s so slim. No foul was called, but Taurean Prince didn’t like it, gave Kleber a little shove as he was coming back up the court, and… that was basically it. Some talking went on, I guess. It’s times like these when I wish that Brandon Jennings was back in the league, because at least he’d bring some finger guns to the proceedings.
Oh, and Kleber also scored 18 points and had 3 blocks. But as we already determined, NBA fans don’t actually care about basketball and would rather get their adrenaline pumping by watching huge dudes who could probably kill with their punches not even punch anyone.