Sam Mitchell had some advice for Anthony Parker and the rest of the Raptors on Sunday after Ray Allen broke away from Parker by coming off a KG screen to stick the game-winning three. Mitchell and the Raps thought that Ray pushed off and that Garnett unfairly tied up Parker so that he couldn’t get out to Ray. Sam’s advice? “Just tap ‘em.”:

“The thing we talked to Anthony and all our guys about – if you’re going to grab me, there’s some things that I can do,” said Sam Mitchell, the Raptors coach. “The officials do a great job, but they’re not going to see everything … So you’ve got to learn how to protect yourself.

Protect oneself how?

“It’s mean, dirty and low-down and y’all already think I’m crazy,” said Mitchell. “I don’t want to read in the paper the next day, `Mitchell tells `em to …’”

The coach didn’t finish the sentence, but you can extrapolate the gist. Mitchell, after all, played 13 seasons in the NBA and only led the league in one statistical category: Fouls. So he knows a thing or two about the unsavoury techniques of the NBA trenches. And he tells a decent story about one particularly low blow.

On the night in question Karl Malone, the Utah Jazz legend, was setting illegal screens that too often ended with Malone’s elbow in the face of Terry Porter, Mitchell’s Minnesota Timberwolves teammate. Pleas to the referees went unheeded and soon enough, Porter’s fist was planted in the Mailman’s sub-drawstring.

“Terry didn’t hit him hard … You ain’t got to hit `em hard. All you’ve got to do is graze `em … Just tap `em. Just ring the little bells,” said Mitchell. “And Karl Malone just dropped. He was screaming, `Ahh! He hit me in the balls! He hit me in the balls!’

“The next pick Karl Malone set … he kept those arms in. I’m telling you, there’s things you can do.”

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