Watch Regina King Nearly Taken out by 76ers Player During NBA Game

Regina King almost had a reason to miss the Oscars after nearly getting knocked over by Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid at Madison Square Garden Wednesday night.

The actress, 48, sat courtside to see the 79ers beat the New York Knicks 126-111. During the game, Embiid ran across the court to get a loose ball. His momentum took him right into the seats, where he would have knocked over King if he did not make the split-second decision to leap over her.

While he avoided King, he still crashed into the MSG Network statistician, who was sitting next to broadcaster Mike Green. He later apologized to the statistician, who never left the game, reports ESPN.

“It’s good that I saved her life, I guess, but someone else had to, like, take that,” Embiid told reporters. “I’m sorry about that.”

King also retweeted a video of the incident and thanked Embiid for saving her life. “Yoooo. Thank you God and [Joel Embiid] for your athletic abilities. Crisis averted,” she wrote, adding a praying hands emoji.

At the time of the incident, the Sixers were up 15 points, but Embiid did not even think of trying to ease up. “I only know one way to play and that’s to play hard and compete,” Embiid said.

As for the leap, Embiid said, “I haven’t done that since my rookie season — and it just happened.”

While Embiid saved King’s life, King has her own experience in life-saving. In a Vanity Fair profile of King, Gabrielle Union credited King with saving her from drowning.

“When I say she literally saved my life that day, she literally saved my life that day. That’s who she is,” Union said. “There are very few people that everybody categorically f—s with — and Regina is just one of those people.”

King is a frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar thanks to her performance in Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. She is a three-time Emmy winner thanks to her roles in ABC’s American Crime and the Netflix miniseries Seven Seconds. She also starred in Jerry Maguire, Daddy Day Care, Ray, The Leftovers and Southland.

In If Beale Street Could Talk, King plays Sharon Rivers, the mother of a young woman whose boyfriend is wrongly imprisoned. While she is excited to have an Oscar nomination for the role, she told PEOPLE she hopes no one asks her how it feels to be at the Oscars on the red carpet.

“It’s like, ‘How am I going to answer this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’ve been asked this question 952 time and I am excited about answering this question again?’ It’s really just a one word answer,” King said. “‘It feels great!’”

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