The best personal beefs in the Jazz-Thunder series

3. Jae Crowder (6-foot-6, 235 lbs.) vs. Carmelo Anthony (6-foot-8, 240 lbs.)

Neither of these players has done much to write home about in terms of basketball so far.

With Game 4 getting out of hand late in the fourth quarter though, Crowder and Melo got into a tussle that ended with Crowder receiving a technical foul and an ejection for hitting Steven Adams with a stray elbow.

Carmelo was actually playing peace-maker or at least not seeming to instigate when it happened. Crowder continued yelling at Melo as teammates grabbed him and escorted him out of the scrum towards the Jazz bench. He probably should have been thanking Carmelo since he’d just assaulted one of the scariest human beings on the planet in Steven Adams. Had Melo not been there holding him until teammates converged to break it up, who’s to say that Steven Adams wouldn’t have decapitated Crowder on the spot?

Adams kept his composure and things deescalated much faster than they could have. Thankfully, Adams had apparently cooled off since he was issued a technical foul earlier in the game.

The rematch we’ll see in Game 5 between these two is as much of a wildcard as any. Melo can get heated, as he showed when he tried to get into the Celtics locker room to go after Kevin Garnett in 2013. But he hasn’t seemed too fired up about anything on a basketball court in the last few years so I wouldn’t expect him to instigate. Given Crowder’s short fuse though and the fact that he’s a much less crucial piece of his team, he’s a guy with nothing to lose, and nothing he could do would surprise me.