“If it would have been anybody but Steve Nash, it probably wouldn’t have been two games,” he said after the Spurs shootaround. “But you know Steve is a great player, MVP. He’s a focal point of the NBA now and they just have to protect their players.”

Horry said Nash over-dramatized the bump when he went flying into the scorer’s table.

“I thought I’d just bump him a little bit,” Horry said. “As you know, the great acting skills Steve has, when he hit the floor, then flopped and did ‘Oh, I’m dying here’ — it happens. I really wasn’t trying to hurt him. I had no malicious intent to hurt Steve. I like Steve. He’s a good person.”

Horry already was a target for Phoenix fans. When he was with the Suns in 1997, he tossed a towel in the face of then-coach Danny Ainge.

Now Phoenix fans have changed Horry’s nickname from “Big Shot Rob” to “Cheap Shot Rob.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” he said. “I was already hated here in Phoenix anyway, but the messed up thing is the boos were kind of disappearing. Damn, now I’ve got to start all over.”

Popovich repeated his belief that Horry’s foul was not that serious.

“It was a hard foul, it was a playoff foul,” he said. “I’ve watched a lot of playoff games and seen harder fouls, so I didn’t think that that was excessive. But on the film, he did what he did. He had his forearm up and it moved forward and he got suspended. I think one game would have probably been good enough. I think that two is a bit excessive.”

Jalen Rose, the Suns’ seldom-used reserve, knew the suspensions were coming. The same thing happened to him when he played for Indiana against Chicago in the 1998 Eastern Conference finals. When a fight broke out near the Bulls’ bench, Rose took “literally one step” onto the court in Game 4. The result was a one-game suspension, and the Bulls went on to win the series.

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“Unfortunately, it does take something like this to change the rule,” Rose said. “A lot of times something’s not addressed until an incident happens that’s well-discussed, well-publicized, well-documented.”

Nash, knocked around like a pinball in this series, refused to address the issue.

“I don’t really want to waste any energy talking about it,” he said.

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