{"id":434539,"date":"2026-01-28T09:54:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-28T09:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/434539\/"},"modified":"2026-01-28T09:54:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-28T09:54:13","slug":"pelicans-jeremiah-fears-held-back-escorted-off-court-as-fight-breaks-out-at-the-buzzer-with-thunders-lu-dort","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/434539\/","title":{"rendered":"Pelicans&#8217; Jeremiah Fears held back, escorted off court as fight breaks out at the buzzer with Thunder&#8217;s Lu Dort"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Things got extremely heated at the final buzzer at the Paycom Center on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n<p>Oklahoma City Thunder guard Lu Dort and New Orleans Pelicans guard Jeremiah Fears had to be separated after they got into a shoving match on the final play of the game \u2014 which sparked a massive scuffle under the basket that took quite a while for officials and coaches to calm down.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>Dort appeared to foul Fears, who was going up for a layup right at the end of the Thunder\u2019s 104-95 win over the Pelicans. That didn\u2019t sit well with Fears, who immediately got into Dort\u2019s face. Quickly, things escalated.<\/p>\n<p>Fears had to be held back repeatedly, and was even seen being escorted to the tunnel while still trying to get back to Dort. It&#8217;s unclear what was said between Dort and Fears, but Pelicans president Joe Dumars even had to get on the court to get involved.<\/p>\n<p>But as the game was over, there were no technical fouls to be dished out. As players were separated and things died down, they simply walked off the floor.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>The issue, Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said, was at least partially on the officials \u2014 who he said failed to manage a similar, though much smaller, altercation earlier.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I thought they lost control of the game in the final minutes,&#8221; he said, <a data-i13n=\"cpos:1;pos:1\" href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/Justintohoops\/status\/2016361021338689736?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\" data-ylk=\"slk:via The Oklahoman&#039;s Justin Martinez;cpos:1;pos:1;elm:context_link;itc:0;sec:content-canvas\" class=\"link \">via The Oklahoman&#8217;s Justin Martinez<\/a>. &#8220;I thought that altercation at the end started well before that with the [Saddiq Bey and Jaylin Williams] situation. I thought they could have managed that cleaner.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And then the second thing is I think that&#8217;s a foul on Dort. And if it was, they should put a whistle on that play regardless of the score and the time. Because if they do that, everybody stops playing and you can legislate the situation as you normally would.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Dort finished with 12 points and eight rebounds in the win for the Thunder. All of his points came from behind the 3-point line, too. Shai GIlgeous-Alexander led the way with 29 points and six rebounds, and Chet Holmgren added 20 points and 14 rebounds. The Thunder led the entire way in the second half to pick up the nine-point win at home, which snapped a two-game losing skid. They now sit at 38-10.<\/p>\n<p>Fears added seven points and two rebounds off the bench for the Pelicans, who fell to just 12-37 with the loss. Zion Williamson led with 21 points and 11 rebounds, and Saddiq Bey finished with 16 points and 13 rebounds.<\/p>\n<p>Advertisement<\/p>\n<p>While there were no in-game penalties, the NBA is sure to hand down some sort of punishment in the coming days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Things got extremely heated at the final buzzer at the Paycom Center on Tuesday night. Oklahoma City Thunder&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":434540,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[16733,32236,45194,153649,355,6932,6402,162352,6407,99,29771],"class_list":["post-434539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-chet-holmgren","tag-dort","tag-jeremiah-fears","tag-joe-dumars","tag-nba","tag-new-orleans-pelicans","tag-oklahoma-city-thunder","tag-saddiq-bey","tag-shai-gilgeous-alexander","tag-sports","tag-zion-williamson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/434540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}