Indiana Pacers' Lance Stephenson calls out Toronto Raptors via Instagram post
The fourth regular season game between the NBA Eastern Conference teams, Indiana Pacers and Toronto Raptors occurred last Tuesday night at the Bankers Life Fieldhouse, Indianapolis. During the final seconds of the game's last quarter, the Pacer's shooting guard/small forward, Lance Stephenson, triggered a dispute between the two teams when he violated one of the league's unwritten rules.
The game turned into a blowout and the Pacers fans watching on their home court are assured the team was going to win the game against DeMar DeRozan's team, which will eventually result to a 2-win tie of each team against each other this season. However, on the last five seconds of the 4th quarter when the ball was in possession of the Pacers' Stephenson, instead of dribbling the ball out until the buzzer, he decided to make a layup, an uncontested shot, which added two points to its already big deficit.
Right after the shot went in, Raptors' guard DeRozan and small forward, PJ Tucker went after Stephenson. Some trashtalks and pushes occurred, which resulted for the refs to call technical fouls to both Stephenson and Tucker. According to NBA.com, right after the blowout win by the Pacers, Tucker expressed his opinion about Stephenson's move and said that he found it classless and tasteless and not right at all.
Fans from all over the world have also shared their opinion about this and people have different insights on whether Stephenson's layup was an ugly move or not. However, despite the public criticism on his last-second layup on their Tuesday night win, Stephenson proved that he did not regret his shot at all through uploading a video on his official Instagram account containing a clip from last year's Raptors game, in which the events were slightly the same from what happened on Tuesday.
A post shared by Lance Stephenson (@stephensonlance) on Apr 5, 2017 at 1:31pm PDT
Stephenson was called out by many critics saying that it was not professional of him to do such a thing during a game and he later apologized saying that he did not mean to cause any harm from the opponent team. However, his latest Instagram post reportedly meant that the Raptors and its fans should have not made it a big deal. Pacers are currently 9th in the East, racing for 8th with Heat and Bulls, while Raptors stand at the 3rd seed.
