Nearly 40 years later, another infamous punch would occur in the NBA. Another punch so devastating it sent one player to the hospital with serious facial and head injuries. However, the aftermath of these events were not the same. In fact, they were unbelievably different.
It's the fall of 2017, and the Chicago Bulls are not having a good time. Six years removed from making the Eastern Conference Finals with league MVP Derrick Rose running the offense, the Bulls now find themselves in rebuilding mode. Rose, Joakim Noah, and coach Tom Thibodeau are long gone, leaving them with a rising star in Jimmy Butler and head coach Fred Hoiberg. The year following Rose, Noah, and Thibodeau's departures in 2015 saw the team go from a 50-win team to barely cracking .500, and their big free agent signings of Dwyane Wade and Rajon Rondo in 2016 earned them a net gain of negative one win. A frustrated Butler was then shipped to the Minnesota Timberwolves in 2017. While the deal did land them some promising young players in Zach LaVine and Lauri Markkanen, it was clear that this season was not going to be a good one for Chicago.
It was during that six-year period that saw the addition of our two main characters in this story to the roster; Bobby Portis and Nikola Mirotić. Portis had been drafted in 2015 with the 22nd pick in the draft. He joined a team that already had Nikola Mirotić, a Spanish prospect who was coming off a rookie season in 2014 after being drafted in 2011 with the 23rd pick by the Houston Rockets, eventually finding his way to Chicago via trades. Both continued to play for the Bulls prior to this season, and if there were any issues between the two, then they did a great job of keeping it on the down-low. However, one practice saw things take a turn for the worse in a violent way.
On October 17th, two days before the Bulls' season opener against the Toronto Raptors, an incident at practice went down. According to an ESPN article, the two had gone back and forth, trash-talking each other before things escalated. Mirotić reportedly charged at Portis, who caught him with a punch right to the face. Mirotić left practice that day with multiple fractures to his upper jaw and a concussion. As for who really started the fight, Zach LaVine has gone on record saying that Portis was "not at fault" for this, while the Bulls took a more diplomatic approach, casting equal blame on the two, but condemning Portis for making it more violent. Mirotić's injuries cost him close to two months of the season, while Portis was suspended for eight games.
What followed after the punch was largely to be expected. Portis has apologized for the incident, but Mirotić had no interest in working things out between the two. That's fair, honestly, as it's a lot easier to forgive yourself for punching someone in the face than it is for the person who actually got punched. The Bulls wanted the tandem to make amends, but Mirotić was dead set in his ways; he had demanded a trade nine days after the incident, and it didn't seem like any apologies, text messages, or attempts at brokering peace would change that. By January, Mirotić got his wish and he was dished to the Pelicans. Mirotić would continue to play in the NBA until 2019 when he signed with FC Barcelona in Europe. Meanwhile, Portis was traded the next season to the Wizards and currently plays for the Bucks.
Now, I want to bring you back to 1977. When Rudy Tomjanovich was punched in the face by Kermit Washington, the injuries he endured would derail his playing career and take him out of the league within three seasons. Nikola Mirotić's injuries were nowhere as severe as Tomjanovich's, but you'd expect that when he came back, he was hampered or, in the best-case scenario, he'd continue playing the way he had before the punch, which was just O.K. However, not only did Mirotić not get worse...it actually made him better.
Before the punch, Nikola Mirotić was a pretty decent, but unremarkable player. In the three seasons between his debut and the punch, Mirotić played in 218 games and averaged 10.8 points and 5.3 rebounds per game while shooting 41% from the field and 35% from three-point range. The best season of his career at that point was his 2015-16 campaign, where he averaged 11.8 points and 5.5 rebounds per game while shooting 41% from the field 39% from three. Mirotić was punched on October 17th, 2017. When he returned, he'd play a total of 101 games over the next two seasons and averaged 15.4 points and 7.4 rebounds while shooting 44% from the field and 37% from three-point range. That's a near 5 points two rebounds per game increase post-punch. Even if you were to account even up the games played and assumed that Mirotić only scored 11 points and grabbed 5 rebounds in each of his next 117 NBA games, he'd still average 13 points and 6.1 rebounds per game, still a noticeable improvement. It's also not like Mirotić suddenly started playing significantly more. His minutes per game only went up from 24 per game the season before the punch to 27.2 per game after it. And in case you were wondering if Mirotić is so much better than before, then why isn't he in the NBA anymore...
I'd say he's doing fine for himself.
There's obviously the possibility that Mirotić was just developing as normal, as he is just 29 years old and was only 26 when he got punched. It's entirely possible this improvement was just Mirotić progressing as a player. However, the timing of these events is just too perfect. Mirotić was punched in the face and got his jaw fractured by a teammate and immediately started putting up better numbers when he came back. Most people would consider getting clocked in the face a bad thing. For Nikola Mirotić, it might have been the best thing that happened for his career.
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