Dillon Brooks kicked Jamal Murray in the groin Friday night, got ejected for a Flagrant 2, and the guy who took the kick stood at the podium afterward and talked the league out of its own call. That gap between what the officials saw and what Murray said happened next is the real story here.
Brooks has spent years turning every marginal shove and contested box-out into a referendum on his character. That reputation is exactly why officials reviewed a guy falling backward on a jumper and came away seeing intent instead of physics. The same track record that had people crediting Dillon Brooks for fixing the Suns’ culture a few weeks ago is the one that got this read as malice in real time.
Murray had every reason to go along with that read. He didn’t.
With 8:05 left in the third quarter, Brooks fell backward on a turnaround jumper and his right leg caught Murray on the way down. The first call was an offensive foul. Officials reviewed it and upgraded it to a Flagrant 2, an automatic ejection and Brooks’s 10th career toss. Phoenix lost its leading scorer on the spot, a guy who’d put up 22 points in 21 minutes on 9 of 12 shooting, and went on to lose 127-120 in NBA Cup group play.
None of that gets erased by what Murray said afterward. Brooks’s leg still connected hard enough to trigger a review in the first place, and a Flagrant 2 gets upgraded on contact, not on provable intent. I don’t think Brooks meant it either, but the league isn’t set up to grade intent off a slow-motion replay, and the call stands no matter who forgives who in the locker room.
https://x.com/LegionHoops/status/2116373283579085029
Asked if he thought Brooks meant it, Murray didn’t hedge. “No, of course not. He’s shooting the ball. I mean, he might have flopped a little bit, but I don’t think he’s really trying to kick me in the [groin], though.” He called Brooks a buddy.
That word carries real weight, given who’s saying it and why.
Brooks and Murray have been teammates on Canada’s national team since 2015, when they won a Pan American Games silver together. Both made Canada’s 2023 FIBA World Cup roster and the training camp roster ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics. They’ve shared locker rooms under a different flag entirely, well before either one carried the profile he does now in the NBA.
Close to a decade of reps together, in the same huddles, long before either one had an All-Star case to make.
Murray still finished with 39 points in the loss. He didn’t play the sympathy angle. He just said what he saw, on the record, with his own name attached to it.
Murray’s the one who actually got kicked, and he’s still the one defending Brooks.
