But after Wall missed the first of three free throws, Crowder was assessed a technical foul for yelling something towards the Wizards bench. Gary Neal made the technical foul free throw before and Wall made his final two to tie the game before Crowder made the game-winning layup with 3.9 seconds remaining.

After the contest, Crowder insisted Wittman provoked the incident by directing profanities at him and calling him soft. On Monday, Wittman denied those claims before the Wizards’ loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.

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“What’s profanity? Crap? Heck?” Wittman responded when asked about Crowder’s claim. “Listen, there was an altercation where he got knocked down. They looked at it, I believe to see if it was a flagrant. You guys can look at the tape. He came back out and I think Nene was the one who knocked him down and he’s now getting into it with Nene. And I’m trying to tell the official something else is going to happen and he see saw that and didn’t like it. That’s all it was. I’m standing right next to the officials so I’m doing something that shouldn’t have been done, the official would’ve noticed that.”

Crowder stood his ground Monday, telling reporters in Dallas, where the Celtics play the Mavericks Monday night, that Wittman instigated him.

“It wasn’t nothing aggressive like that to get a technical foul,” Crowder said of the altercation between him and Nene. “It was going to be resolved, and then I hear [Wittman] over there saying what he was saying and that’s what got my attention … I was like, ‘What? Is that coming from him?’ That caught me by surprise. If you watch the film, everything caught me by surprise. I let a lot of words go and I just retaliated, and I got hit.”

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The Celtics return to Washington Monday for the fourth and final regular season meeting between the teams this season.

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