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The Dallas Mavericks and Phoenix Suns renewed their heated rivalry on Friday night, and they added another fiery moment to the long list of incidents over the last few years between these two teams. Jusuf Nurkic, Naji Marshall and P.J. Washington all got ejected after a big fight broke out during the game.
In the middle of the scuffle, it appeared that Marshall got a clean straight right hand right on the chin of Nurkic. After the game, Marshall got straight to trolling and updated his profile banner on X, formerly Twitter, to a picture of the punch.
The fight was representative of the slugfest that was an ugly win for the Mavericks over the Suns in a 98-89 dogfight. Neither team could get anything going consistently on the offensive end of the floor, and both teams leaned heavily on their defenses to get the job done. In the end, that team was the Mavericks thanks to 20 points from Kyrie Irving.
Marshall had just four points in 19 minutes for the Mavericks before he was tossed and Washington has just seven points of his own in 20 minutes. On the other side, Nurkic had just three points in 14 minutes.
The Suns will be very frustrated with this loss for a few different reasons. First, star guard Luka Doncic didn't play in this game for the Mavericks after going down with a calf strain on Christmas Day. Without Doncic and with Irving struggling to find his shot, the Mavericks struggled to score points in this one and were still able to come away with a win.
The other reason is that Kevin Durant did have it going for Phoenix in this one. The superstar scorer scored 35 points on 11-for-19 shooting to carry the load on offense for the Suns in this one, but he didn't get much help from his teammates over the course of the night. Bradley Beal went just 5-for-18, and the Suns as a team shot less than 33% outside of Durant.
