Saturday night, with the Bulls hosting the Wizards, teammate puncher Bobby Portis sent not one but both available Wizards point guards to the locker room with bloody head wounds. Clearly, clearly, this is part of the grand conspiracy to bring Derrick Rose to the Washington Wizards.
Early in the second quarter, with his Bulls down eight, Portis stepped forward to pressure Tim Frazier, who’d dribbled himself into trouble. Frazier, more than a little out of control, stumbled forward, and his face collided hideously with Portis’s left knee:
The good news, for the Wizards, was that Tomas Satoransky, filling in as the starter in John Wall’s absence, was already having a career night: he scored 11 points in the first quarter and set a new career-high (and all-time Czech-born NBA-high) with 25 points on the game. The loss of Frazier would hurt, but they still had a hot hand available to play the position. No need for any free agent nonsense.
Until! With 2:35 left in the fourth quarter and the Wizards up 10, Satoransky beat a sloppy Lauri Markkanen close-out (possibly Markkanen is in on the plot???) and drove in for an aggressive finish. Portis swooped across the lane and made a reckless play that caught Satoransky at the height of his jump and sent him pinwheeling into the hardwood. Warning: the sound when Satoransky hits the floor is gut-churning, as is the sight of blood flowing down the side of his face:
Portis was assessed a Flagrant-2 on the play and ejected. Satoransky, of course, did not return to the game. He seems like he might be OK? I would for sure have broken apart like a Lego model if it’d been me:
Portis described the collision as “a basketball play” after the game. I am a Wizards fan, and so I was swearing a vendetta against Portis before Satoransky even made it off the floor, but it certainly looked, in replays, like Portis went for the ball, instead of, say, delivering a forearm shiver to Satoransky’s chest. He crashed in there with quite a lot of force, especially for a desperate, long-shot play, one that was not likely at all to result in anything other than a foul. I do not have a hard time believing that Bobby Portis intended to just make a play on the ball, there, but was too clumsy a galoot to do it without creating lots of danger.
But the result is the same: The Wizards, already without their All Star point guard for six weeks while he recovers from a knee procedure, were being linked to Derrick Rose before they lost one veteran backup point guard to a fractured nose that may require surgery, and one developing point-guard who had his head ricochet off the floor hard enough to draw blood. It’s hard to imagine how this sequence of events doesn’t end with Derrick Rose starting at point guard for the Wizards Wednesday night, against the Knicks.
For that reason alone, Bobby Portis, Wizards Point Guard Slayer, must be the sworn enemy of all Wizards fans, forever.