After seeing his team's 27 game winning streak come to an end to the Chicago Bulls, Miami Heat forward LeBron James had plenty complaints about the hard fouls in which he was the recipient of. Well on Thursday Bulls forward Taj Gibson responded to James' complaints, simply saying he was surprised by the whole thing.
"I think he's too good of a player to do that," Gibson said on "The Carmen & Jurko Show" on ESPN 1000.
"You just play, two teams really going out there and play hard, going to the basket extremely hard and physical."
James mentioned fouls from both Gibson and guard Kirk Hinrich as not being "basketball plays." He described the foul with Gibson, claiming that he collared him on a drive to the basket with 4:01 left in the fourth quarter.
Gibson explained how the play went from his point of view:
"I didn't try to collar him," Gibson said. "I just fouled him. It wasn't intentionally.
"I just tried to make a play on the ball, but I fouled him. When he fell, it looked like I collared him. I was really trying to grab him, just not hold him up. Nobody was intentionally trying to hurt anybody out there. When he said those comments, I was really shocked. But it's part of the game, I guess."
Gibson later went on to explain the nature of the rivalry between the two teams will almost ensure a physical game every time they meet.
"Every game we played them was a physical game," Gibson said. "You're going to know things are like that; tough, hard fouls are going to be called. You just can't expect the games to be so lightly taken after you just blew us out by 20 the last time we played you guys.
We just went out and played our normal style of basketball. We just got back to the basics," he said. "We're normally a real dominant rebounding team. We tried to help each other on defense. One thing we just did is just played a little bit harder.
"They really embarrassed us the last time we played in Chicago. And we really didn't like how they celebrated. So we just came out, put forth more effort and guys stepped up."
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