The AP and the Star are reporting former Knicks PG Stephon Marbury is accused of assaulting a fan following a Chinese Basketball Association playoff defeat Sunday. I can neither confirm or deny this story was fed to me by someone in the MSG public relations department, eager to distract from the tiny matter of the Knicks losing their 6th consecutive contest.
The 35-year-old Marbury and his Beijing Ducks teammates were trapped in their team van after their 102-100 road loss Sunday to the Shanxi Brave Dragons, Marbury’s original team when he joined the league in 2010. A newspaper photograph showed fans pounding on the windows of the van.
Marbury was quoted Tuesday by the official China Daily as saying he and the fans had been separated by guards. However, he disputed reports he’d hit a fan.
“I didn’t do that,” Marbury said. “How could I do that over the security guards?”
“We know that for us to win it all we must trust one another because we are at war now,” Marbury wrote in a column carried in the China Daily.