The Blazers and Nuggets met for Game 2 of their first round series in Denver on Monday night after Portland took Game 1 to swipe homecourt advantage. The first half unsurprisingly saw Denver come out hot after a bit of a flat offensive showing in Game 1, led by Nikola Jokic who had 25 points, to which Portland responded with an outrageous Damian Lillard stretch as he had 32 points including eight three-pointers in the first half.
While Dame went off, the rest of the Blazers struggled to get into a rhythm or consistently into the flow of the offense, and Denver was able to keep them at arm’s length for most of the game. That didn’t keep things from getting chippy, as there were kerfuffles going into timeouts between the two benches, hard fouls, and generally physical play. That led, somewhat disastrously, to the referees trying to get a hold of the game by calling a lot of fouls, including one of the softest flagrant fouls you’ll ever see.
In the third quarter, Facu Campazzo, Denver’s provocateur extaordinaire, was trying to get up into CJ McCollum’s body before an inbounds play and got a bit too close for McCollum’s liking, so he gave him a bit of a shove which led Campazzo to embellish as he is wont to do.
Con el Facu no, CJ ehhh pic.twitter.com/0oZZPqdw1f
— TeamFacu (@TeamFacu7) May 25, 2021
It is a rather unremarkable push and one that, maybe, could’ve been called a regular foul but is the kind of jockeying that happens a lot in these situations that Facu tried to sell. Unfortunately for the Blazers, the refs were buying, and went to take a look at the play on review and returned with a stunning Flagrant 1 call on McCollum, who was rightfully in disbelief at the whole situation.
The reverse angle really shows how Facu sold this, pulling McCollum into him before taking the dive.
Facu baited CJ McCollum into this pic.twitter.com/ZxP9sX0Dxl
— CJ Fogler account may or may not be notable (@cjzero) May 25, 2021
That the refs looked at this on the monitor and had this angle and still gave the flagrant is truly wild, and had Blazers fans — and most every casual observer who isn’t a Nuggets fan — very confused and upset. What made it even worse was that Facu flopped into the legs of Nikola Jokic, risking the potential injury of his MVP frontrunner teammate for this sell job. Happily, Jokic was able to hop out of the way of disaster, but at the very least, if Facu is going to flop so dramatically, he should consider his surroundings better.
