Apparently, kicking Devin Booker in the nuts is a judgment call.
That was the latest reminder that NBA officiating can leave everybody staring at the screen, wondering how the same kind of play turns into three different outcomes.
It happened in the third quarter of the Phoenix Suns’ matchup with the San Antonio Spurs, with Phoenix already down 20. Keldon Johnson pulled down an offensive rebound and went up from about three feet out.
As he rose, his leg kicked out and made forceful contact with Devin Booker’s junk. Booker went straight to the floor in pain, but the officials let it go and kept the game moving.
At the time, there was no whistle, no review, and no flagrant assessment. Johnson’s motion could be viewed as part of his shot, the kind of balance move a player might make in the air. But the result was still the same: Booker took a shot to the groin and the play stayed live.
That’s what made the comparison to Dillon Brooks so hard to ignore. Last week, Brooks was assessed a Flagrant 2 and ejected after a jump shot against Jamal Murray.
Brooks did extend his leg, and he often shoots that way, using the motion to stabilize himself in the air. Still, the league treated that play as a much bigger offense than the one involving Johnson.
Then came the NBA’s postgame review. Today, the league upgraded Johnson’s contact to a Flagrant 1.
So what wasn’t even enough for a foul in real time was serious enough to draw a flagrant after the fact. That kind of reversal only sharpens the frustration, because it doesn’t change what happened when the game was being played.
Phoenix was down 20 when the incident took place, so this isn’t about pretending one whistle would have flipped the result. It’s about the standard itself.
Johnson got a retroactive Flagrant 1. Brooks got a Flagrant 2 and an ejection for what looked, on the surface, like a similar kind of leg kick.
That leaves a simple question hanging in the air: what exactly is the difference?
The officiating crew also came under scrutiny, especially Justin Van Duyne. There’s already a history there, and not a comforting one from a Suns perspective. Van Duyne, along with Tyler Ford, was involved in the sequence that led to Devin Booker being ejected in a nationally televised game against the Los Angeles Lakers a few years ago after Booker picked up technical fouls.
That’s why this latest episode landed so hard. If the league wants to punish dangerous contact, fine.
If it wants to protect players, fine. But the standard has to make sense from one night to the next.
When one play draws a Flagrant 2, another gets nothing in real time, and then the league later comes back with a Flagrant 1, it’s hard not to ask for more consistency.
And if the NBA can review the play the next day and decide Johnson deserved a flagrant, then the officials on the floor, including Van Duyne, should be held to account for missing it when it mattered. A retroactive ruling may clean up the record, but it doesn’t fix the call that never came.
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