Juice Thompson a dirty player?

There was some mild hullabaloo made about some poll that showed juice's peers rated him the dirtiest player in the big ten. We have to be honest--we never thought of juice as a dirty player, but we just filed away that nugget to see if there was much basis to that assertion.

Well ladies and gents let's go to the videotape (or dvr/TiVo if you want to go all 21st century). Check out the 12:30 mark of the second half. On a seemingly innocuous play that resulted in a tech foul, just prior to the foul juice gave iman shumpert a not-so-gentle two handed shove that would make our football ol proud. Shumpert went flying back a few feet and then had this quizzical look on his face after the whistle blew on his teammate of all people.

There were another couple of instances of push offs, but really the only other excessive looking one occurred in the first half on a clear out for a shurna three. Juice did hit the ground as he shoved shumpert so maybe he tripped. We do find it curious that shumpert was on the business end of two Thompson hard shoves. Maybe juice took it personally that shumpert, who is a class behind juice, didn't think nu had enough talent to commit to nu. Dunno.

The one play that possibly be dirty was near the very end of the first half where the ball bounded out and juice hit the floor with a tech big. It was pretty hard to tell if juice gave a little extra oomph to push the techie into the floor but there wasn't exactly any love lost between the two as they picked themselves up off the floor.

Dirty? That seems a bit much. We'd call it crafty. Check that. Let's call it wily which sounds more befitting for a northwestern player.