David Stern has spoken. Carmelo Anthony will serve a 15 game suspension for his role in the on-court riot Saturday night at Madison Square Garden. The other players deemed culpable received lesser but still stiff penalties. The teams were hit with $500,000 fines.
A few quick thoughts. I approve of ‘Melo’s punishment, which is considerably above that meted out for previous incidents and thus is likely to be reduced on appeal. (The fact that Isaiah Thomas skated, as usual, is appalling.) Stern knows that the league took an enormous public relations hit from the Ron Artest brawl a few years back and he thought he’d gotten his message across to the players. Evidently not. He had to pick out the highest profile offender and raise the ante.
Fighting is hardly new to basketball. Kermit Washington punch’s nearly killed Rudy T. The sainted Larry Bird and Dr. J even got into it, although it was a typical pro sports fight, no harm no foul. But over the past decade pro basketball had seemed on the verge of spilling out of control and into the stands, culminating in the Artest fiasco. Thus Stern’s intervention.
There once did seem to a self-enforcing mechanism that limited the mayhem when the league was much smaller and the big men much bigger (in the sense that you really, really didn’t want to fight them). Wilt Chamberlain – a gentle giant, really, but a giant nonetheless – once decided he’d break up a shoving match involving one of the league’s tough guys, Wayne Embry (6-8, 280 or so), if I recall correctly. Wilt picked him up by his jersey and sort of slid him out of bounds, from the free throw line. Everyone stopped and stared. Wilt had gotten angry. You wouldn’t like Wilt when he was angry. That was that. No one stepped in to challenge Wilt. I don’t think even a technical foul was assessed. On with the game.
Perhaps my rosy-eyed revisionism is unjustified. But I wonder how much of these gang-like brawls in basketball are related to the gang-like culture with which many of the young players identify. They are clever – they fund showy charitable activities, as Carmelo Anthony has done, but then they are off to their favorite head-banging nightclub, where they wind up in a parking lot fight at 3 in the morning. ESPN has been running an interesting feature on pro athletes and guns. One estimate of pro basketball players puts gun ownership at 90%. Many athletes carry guns. They point out that they feel they need the protection when their public visibility makes them likely targets. Boston’s Paul Pierce was knifed and seriously injured a few years ago. One of course supports their Second Amendment right to protect themselves and their family. But in this case Karl Malone, former NBA great, outdoorsman and hunter, scoffs. He says it’s not about protection of home and person. You take a young athlete, drunk, with his posse, at a club at 3 in the morning, with a gun. Good luck.
I wonder how far we are away from a similar outbreak in professional football, which has been remarkably disciplined given the fact that it’s a violent collision sport, to use Vince Lombardi’s term. The Miami-FIU brawl earlier this season reminds us this can happen. Especially as the police blotter for pro football players continues to grow. At least 35 NFL players have been arrested this year on charges ranging from disorderly conduct to felony burglary. To be sure, football players have never been saints (or Saints) but once again, one wonders if the old inside-the-game enforcement mechanism will break down.
It is interesting to observe that professional hockey now seems to have less fighting than other pro sport.
Why? Stricter penalties for fighting such as the "instigator" rule. Also "third man in a fight" results in ejection and suspension. The NHL will not ban fighting, but then the nature of the gsme with its speed and hard hits eventually leads to two players going at it mainly to let off steam. The occasional fight does not bother me.
It is now hard to find a "goon" in the NHL. Goons now seem to reside in the NBA (and way overpriced).
The NHL has, by far, more fighting than any other mainstream American sport (where fighting is not the means of the competition). The NBA has less fighting than either the NFL and MLB. The difference is media attention. The media attention to fighting in basketball is a result of:
1) Players compete in shorts and tanktops for uniforms. When you think of an NBA player, his face immediately comes to mind. When you think of an NFL player, their face is more difficult to recall. I would say the same for MLB players, at least when you imagine them being on the field. There is a difference b/w watching a fight in an open-air stadium or ridiulously large dome with players in uniforms covering most of their bodies and watching players fight in a relatively small playing court in shorts and tanktops.
2) Since the ugly Pacers-Pitons fight at the Palace, the NBA has been under strict scrutiny by the public and the media in terms of the character of its players. Also, the NBA has added to the media attention by instituting somewhat controversial policies to clean up their image that bring added media attention. It is almost a revolving circle that becomes vicious when things like the Knicks-Nuggets fight occurs...it makes things look hopeless and only maintains the "NBA is made up of thugs" image. That image is unfair when compared to other sports. (Cincinnati Bengals = 8 players arrested this year. One of them 4 times). I think the style, race, and public profile of its stars are the main cause. (Though I would argue players like LeBron, Dwayne, Kevin Martin, Tim Duncan, and Elton Brand are helping to change that image).
I agree with Mr. Garrity’s disgust that Isaiah Thomas gets off with not even a slap on the wrist. Be a great player and play cutsey with an even greater player during the golden 80s of the NBA, and apparently you get a free pass for future recklessness (construct the worst team in the NBA in the League’s highest profile city, then, when the League’s best coach finishes with the worst record with that team, fire him, take over the team, and remain in the League’s basement, then, instigate a fight by telling a player to foul hard if the opposing team drives to the hole b/c your horrible team is rightly getting badly beaten, then lack enough prudence to tell the media that you instructed your player to do so. John Chaney did this at Temple not so long ago, and he didn’t get off so easy. Then?...Have the League react by saying: "Zero-tolerance policy for this activity...oh? Isaiah told his player to foul hard only because they were getting badly beaten? But look at him, he’s so cute and has a great smile. Remember when he and Magic kissed before that NBA Finals game, remember when he hit that game-winner...I think we should re-evaluate the situation before we take action against him. Let’s let all the facts get out."
There are 1696 NFL players (32 teams x 53 players per team). Out of these there have only been 35 arrests? That’s means 2% are criminals (if my math is correct)
What is the average for the national population as a whole?
Tuesday night’s PTI featured Bob Ryan, longtime Boston Globe sportwriter, filling in for Tony the K. Ryan, as he stated several times, has covered the NBA for 38 years, and he thinks the concern about last week’s fistcuffs is disproportinate to the crime. Ryan’s pointed out that there are far fewer fights today than in the NBA of a few decades ago. He offered to list the top ten fights for Dave Cowens (Celtics undersized center, 1970-1982), as proof the old timers mixed it up more than the current players.
The issue, for both Ryan & Wilbon, is Stern’s attempt to curb the gangsta image of the current NBA. Stern desperately wants Lebron James to be the face of the league not Allen Iverson. The retirement of the Greatest Generation of NBA players (Bird, Magic, Kareem, Jordan, Erving, Robinson, Barkley, et al) coincided with the spread of the young inner city--black--culture to the burbs and the world. Baby boomer NBA fans are uncomfortable with that culture--the music, clothes, tats, staged violence--longing for the Bill Walton and their dreams of a Woodstock Nation. And those Boomers rule the corporate world Stern has so carefully cultivated over the past 25 years. Hence, the dress code, the annointing of King James before he played a game, and the "crackdown" on the fighting.
The league is less violent than the one we Boomers grew up with, but we saw more white men, like Dave Cowens and Larry Bird, doing the punching, and that was OK. The league is now overwhelming black, with exactly seven white, US-born players on the All Star ballot (for ten bucks, name all seven), none of whom is a household name except to his own family.
Race is a terribly hard subject in this country. Important where it shouldn’t be; ignored where it really is a factor. Here, it’s a factor.
Ten bucks? I’ll give it an honest shot:
Kirk Hinrich
Mike Miller
Brad Miller
Luke Walton(?)
Wally Sczerbiack
Luke Ridenour(?)or
Jeff Foster(?)or
Adam Morrison(?)
PTI is the best sports talk show on television. Tony and Wilbon have great chemistry (though I thought Tony would be better on MNF, he seems out of his comfort zone there) and speak thoughtfully with passion. Bob Ryan is great because you can literally see his brain grind when he talks.
I agree with your analysis for the most part Michael (except for the household name part, Kirk Hinrich was on the U.S. World Basketball team). Race is a big factor and in all honesty I think WASPish middle America reacts differently (subconciously or not) to seeing black men fight then they do to white men fighting. But, the context is the biggest thing. Stealing a Bob Ryan phrase, the "Malice at the Palace" has the social barometer turned up to glaring red and the NBA is right in reacting with a "zero tolerance" policy. The primary cause here is the Palace fight.
In all discussions about the NBA, I’ll now go neo-Kato:
Isaiah must be suspended.
What a joke the All-Star ballot is. Do they pick the names three years in advance? Shareef Abdur-Rahim (non-starter) is on it for the Kings but not leading scorer Kevin Martin?
Anyways, here’s my count on white, American-born players in the NBA on the all-star ballot:
Luke Ridnour
Chris Kaman
Wally Sczcerbiak
Kirk Hinrich
Mike Miller
Troy Murphy
Chris Mihm
Brad Miller
Jason Williams
That’s nine. Granted, that’s probably much more than in other recent years. Also, of the nine, only two or three (Hinrich and Kaman, maybe Mike Miller) have a chance to be all-stars, and one (Jason Williams) has the horrible nickname of "white chocolate" (how race-based can you get?)
Excellent effort, Fred. I consider myself a fairly serious sports fan and I wouldn’t gotten more than three.
Kirk Hinrich a household name?! You’re either a Kansas or Bulls fan.
I know this thread is probably totally dead, but I wonder why Michael makes such a point of excluding foreign-born white players. It is certainly true that basketball, within US borders, is primarily popular among black youth while white youths seem more interested in football and baseball by and large. But the NBA is far from an all-black league and the sport is increasingly international.
If we include non-US-born players in the discussion, the last two number one overall picks have been white (Bogut and Bargnani). Arguably the two best players in the Western Conference are white (Nowitzki and Nash). The MVP of the past two seasons is white (Nash). Arguably the top center in the league is not black (Ming).
The increase in international players, I believe, is making the NBA less of an all-black league than it was just a few years ago. It may be years, or perhaps never again, before basketball becomes a popular sport among US white youth, but a league that is being dominated in many ways this season by Nowitzki and Nash seems far from a black league.