NBA phoned Nowitzki before suspending Livingston

DALLAS – Dallas Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki received an interesting telephone over the weekend.

It was an NBA investigator wanting to know his version of what happened when Golden State guard Shaun Livingston smacked him in the groin with 1:28 remaining in the third quarter of Saturday’s Mavs-Warriors game. Livingston was issued a Flagrant-1 foul after the play, and the NBA suspended him on Sunday for one game without pay.

After the game, Nowitzki said he didn’t think Livingston deliberately hit him and he didn’t think it warranted a suspension. But the long arm of the NBA law, obviously, gets the last word in such incidents.

"There’s been some incidents where guys got hit in their private parts and it’s been pretty much an automatic suspension whether it was by accident or not,’’ Nowitzki said after Monday’s practice. "It is what it is.

"The NBA obviously does an investigation on every flagrant foul and they called me and I just told them what I saw and I didn’t think it was intentional. But it was a one-game suspension regardless and I think everybody moved on from there.’’

This story was originally published April 6, 2015 at 1:43 PM with the headline "NBA phoned Nowitzki before suspending Livingston."