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There are few more talked-about dunks this season than that of Zion Williamson’s 360 windmill flush at the end of the New Orleans Pelicans’ win over the Phoenix Suns. The game was already won at that point and a few players on the Suns decided to confront Zion for what they deemed to have been an unsportsmanlike move.
For his part, Suns stud Mikal Bridges didn’t seem to mind the dunk too much. On a recent episode of The Old Man & The Three podcast, Bridges was asked by host JJ Redick to talk about what the latter labeled as “fake rage” from the Suns after seeing Williamson dunk the ball with the clock running out. According to Bridges, he didn’t see anything wrong with what the Pelicans superstar did:
“Nah. No. I think for me, personally, hell no,” Bridges admitted. “S**t, I was the one that dunked that thing last year. I was T’d up. I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m dunkin’ it.'”
Bridges then tried to justify the altercation, saying that it may have started with Chris Paul getting into it with Jose Alvarado. In the end, however, it is clear that Bridges has absolutely no beef against Zion for what he did:
“I mean, it’s whatever. We lost,” Bridges continued. “… I don’t get that. I don’t even get it to this day about that whole ‘sportsmanship.’ … I get it sometimes, but if you’re fired up and the team got a little rival with and all that stuff, yeah, you gonna go as crazy as you want. You wanna dunk. You at home, you want the crowd to go crazy. So, a hundred percent. And it’s Zion.”
Bridges clearly has no issue with it, but you can’t really say the same about the other players on the Suns. The fans didn’t seem to like it either. Whatever the case may be, we now have a brewing rivalry on our hands, and that’s obviously great for the NBA.