excerpt from mysa.com
Bowen chased Cassell, bumping him and hand-fighting him as he does, when Cassell fell. Bowen stood over him, keeping his leg against Cassell as if to suggest he might as well stay on the floor for a while.
Cassell naturally protested, springing up to confront Bowen in front of the Minnesota bench. A ref called a foul on both as everyone screamed, and that's when Flip Saunders said it.
"He's dirty!" Saunders told a ref.
Compared to other things said on this road trip, "dirty" is tame. Bowen forced Ray Allen to miss 9 of his first 12 shots in Seattle, after all, and Allen afterward called Bowen's style "sissy basketball."
Is it possible to be both dirty and a sissy?
Vince Carter took the rhetoric to another level last week. When Carter went up for a jumper, Bowen pivoted and turned his back on Carter, and Carter sprained his ankle when he came down on a Bowen foot.
Carter later implied Bowen had done it on purpose. "It's not very often," Carter said, "you see someone put their foot up under me like that."
Bowen is clever. But replays showed Bowen's head was turned the other way. Could he have really planned what happened?
The same is true of another incident in Minnesota, this one two years ago. Then Bowen leaped and struck Wally Szczerbiak in the face with a foot.
The late Bruce Lee would have been pressed to pull off the move. But the NBA fined Bowen, and Saunders referred to the incident again Sunday before the game.
Saunders called it "a dirty move." But Saunders also said he loved Bowen and his competitiveness.
"A lot of times, good defensive players are borderline dirty or whatever," Saunders said. "They play with that kind of intensity, they get caught in those situations a lot. They play so hard, you get a reputation, maybe, that they let you get away with a little bit more."
Bowen would take pride in most of that. But in the third quarter, Bowen agreed with nothing. Then Saunders, perhaps the topic still in his head from the pregame interview, was more blunt in front of Bowen.
Bowen went after Saunders as players rarely do the other coach. "I am not a dirty player!" Bowen yelled. "I play the game the way it's supposed to be played!"
Some road trip for Bowen. He had taken out Allen, Carter and Cassell in three different ways.
But dirty? Bowen went up to Saunders after the game. "I told him what he said was unfair," Bowen said. "It's disrespectful. It's the worst thing a coach can say about a player, and he wouldn't want me saying those kinds of things about him."
But Bowen impacts games, and the evidence comes afterward when other teams complain about him. If he didn't frustrate them, they wouldn't talk.
