SALT LAKE CITY — After a night of mayhem and arguably after personally offering some of the best Miami Heat defense played in years, Andy Elisburg summed up the moment eloquently.
“I didn’t know for my birthday that I was going to be a meme.”
But there he was, across Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, standing back to the camera, in a hallway at Ball Arena, the Heat general manager preventing his team’s players from potentially escalating what had been a push-comes-to-vicious-shove incident between Heat forward Markieff Morris and Nuggets center Nikola Jokic on Monday night late in Denver’s blowout victory.
The moment was captured in the backstage area of the arena by Denver Post photographer Aaron Ontiveroz.
Elisburg, having moved on with the team’s flight to Los Angeles, was among the last to know.
At 8 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, the NBA called Elisburg to make him aware an investigation on the incident had been opened.
“I looked at the wall clock and it’s 5 o’clock,” Elisburg said. “I got a 5 a.m. call saying they were doing the investigating, which is standard. But obviously the timing was a little odd. But that happens sometimes when you’re on the road.
“And at about 6 o’clock in the morning I rolled over and said, ‘Let me see what’s on Twitter?’ And I got to Twitter and I saw the pictures coming through up on Twitter, and I was like, ‘O ... K ...”
Because there stood Elisburg, at 6-foot-6, arm on one door, other arm near the opposite opening, essentially building a wall while facing the intense faces of Kyle Lowry, Bam Adebayo, Dewayne Dedmon and Jimmy Butler, among others.
It wasn’t necessarily a roadblock planned, but it was one that well might have prevented a major collision.
“In situations like that,” Elisburg said to the South Florida Sun Sentinel, “you want to make sure that everything stays as calm as possible, leave everything on the floor, let’s not make anything worse.
“Everyone’s emotional at those particular moments and you just want everyone to just sort of calm down. The picture looked more than it really was. But you just want to make sure you try to keep everyone as safe as you can.”
Essentially, he posted up half of the Heat’s rotation.
“With situations like that, when the locker rooms are closer together, you probably are better to make sure you’re between the various things,” he said. “The picture [angle] was behind me, so nothing had happened at that point in time that would elicit to me that anything would come of it. But it’s sort of an open door.
“Obviously I didn’t know about the picture ‘til the next day.”
As in on his birthday, having turned 54 Tuesday.
Elisburg is smiling now, not because Jokic was suspended one game or that Morris was fined $50,000 and Butler $30,000, for escalating.
But rather because having been with the Heat for all 34 of the franchise’s seasons, including as general manager since 2013, he appreciates that it was a photo that might have exaggerated a thousand words.
“Everyone was upset,” he said of the postgame moment. “But this is a team that has been around for a long time. It’s not everyone’s first rodeo. So I think cooler heads definitely prevailed from where it was.”
With his height, he was able to look his players directly in the eyes, words not needed at that moment of truth.
“Certainly the fact you have that [height] is certainly there,” he said. “But I think there’s a respect level that you have with the players, regardless of height or size or everything else. They respect that you’re out there looking out for their best interests and you’re out there looking out for them.
“That is not my first security duty where I’ve had to try to put myself in between, and I’m able to sort of do that a little bit.”
