Magic guard Arron Afflalo tried to punch Wolves forward Nemanja Bjelica on Tuesday night. The two got into it during the second quarter of their game, which led Afflalo throwing a serious uppercut at Bjelica that caught the back of the big man’s head. Bjelica responded by putting Afflalo in a headlock, which as he claimed after the game, he did with the hopes of calming Afflalo down.
Incidents like this are, invariably, a bad look for the league. This was partly because one player tried to knock out another player, and partly because this came on the heels of a messy and highly-publicized altercation between the Houston Rockets and Los Angeles Clippers that occurred less than 24 hours earlier.
As it turns out, the league was really upset about this incident, so much so that it edited the clip out of both the Magic’s and Timberwolves’ streams in its League Pass archive. Here are the clips of each, you’ll notice that there’s a really sudden cut in both feeds.
The strange thing is that both cut in such a way that the announcers still reference Afflalo throwing the punch, but neither show exactly what happened. Who knows exactly why the NBA decided to do this and whether this will be a policy going forward, but it is certainly a unique way to handle situations where a punch is thrown.
