Normally, there's a brief bit of contact, a whole lot of jawing, a handful of shoves and teammate intervention to keep things from escalating.
However, when Young got into a tussle midway through the second quarter of the Los Angeles Lakers' 121-114 loss on Wednesday night, the last part of the process never happened. Not for Young.
He took exception to a hard foul by Suns rookie Alex Len and traded shoves with the 7-footer. Then Len's teammate, Marcus Morris, gave Young a couple shoves. Young, perhaps looking for anyone closer to his size, moved down the line and threw something—an open-handed shove? a punch?—at Goran Dragic's face.
Young was ejected, but that's not the reason he was seething after the game.
"What I'm mad about is it was 1-on-5, I felt like," he said, via Dave McMenamin of ESPN Los Angeles. "If somebody [from the Lakers] would have got in the middle, everything wouldn't have escalated that much."
Lakers coach Mike D'Antoni didn't see it the same way.
"You don't fight in this league," D'Antoni said. "It wouldn't help us to lose two or three more guys."
There's an argument to be made for both sides, and people willing to make those opinions known. Former Laker Robert Horry said that Young's teammates needed to get involved:
Then again, Horry is old school, so this might not have even qualified as a fight back in his day. But Horry wasn't the only one making that claim. Pau Gasol agreed that the Lakers didn't do enough for their scoring guard:
The numbers game lends some credence to D'Antoni's point. The Lakers' roster has been decimated by injury and only eight players made an appearance Wednesday night.
