A Eurobasket warm-up game has once again turned needlessly ugly.
And this time, Slovenia’s Goran Dragic, normally a cool character in these situations is at the heart of it all as he pointlessly lost his temper in the early stages of a 72-53 win over Turkey.
Close to four minutes of the first quarter gone, and Dragic, driving to the hoop looked to have the ball striped off him by Turkey’s Dogus Balbay. As soon as Dragic lost the ball, he shoved Balbay right into the advertising boards.
Balbay then stupidly reacted to Dragic’s shove by shoving Dragic in the face. All hell then broke loose.
See for yourself.
{youtube}2k1bfyJ6Tsc{/youtube}
The result was that Dragic was rightfully ejected from the game.
So with Eurobasket now four weeks away, the small nation prepares itself for their biggest sporting event since gaining independence. Unfortunately now, questions will be asked about this, and Dragic himself will have to prepare for a mass amount of criticism and questions asked about mind set for the tournament.
Watching the footage, it will be interesting to see what happens to these two particular players. There was a mass evacuation of the court as well so there might be punishments coming for the benches too. This thankfully was nothing like the brawl between Serbia and Greece during the warm-ups for the 2010 world championships that resulted in Nenad Krstic spending a night in a jail cell.
