There is a single NFL team that has 8, count them, 8, arrests in the last 12 months, a Chicago Bears lineman was arrested for having 6 unregistered guns in his home, one player stomped on another's head with his cleats, and countless other incidents, and yet...it is the NBA that has the public image of being a league of thugs and goons. This past weekend, there was an on-court brawl involving half a dozen players from the New York Knicks and the Denver Nuggets, resulting in over 50 combined games in suspensions and $1,000,000 in fines betwixt the two teams.
This should be a golden age for the league; last season's NBA playoffs were the best and had the highest ratings in nearly a decade, almost all of the major stars in the leauge are under 30 and on winning teams, and they instituted a dress code and a "no-whining" rule in attempt to tighten up appearances. David Stern, the commisioner, should be on top of the world, and yet, once again he's gotta do damage control to try to clean up the inexplicably negative image of his league.
I say it is inexplicable because the conduct really is nothing egregious, relatively speaking. Granted, in most lines of work, fighting on the job would get you fired (and probably sued/arrested), but this sports, and in sports this is nothing to write home about. There are on-field fights in baseball every week, with a batter charging the pitchers mound followed by the dugouts clearing. In hockey, the officials allow the players to fight, they will literally stand back and watch, then penalize them a whopping 5 minutes off the ice. But somehow, when there is a fight on the court in basketball, it merits overblown media coverage across all networks and news programs, as if it were the most newsworthy item of the day.
Am I saying we should just let is pass? No, I don't think fighting should be tolerated in any professional sports, save boxing and billiards; but if we are going to let every other sport get a free pass for miscreancy, then I see no reason to hold the NBA to a higher standard, as if basketball had some hard earned reputation as the sport of the moral paragon.
Maybe it's because the league decided earlier this decade to become the "hip-hop" league, and now it's reaping what it's sown as the media have conflated basketball players and rappers, or if it's because we can see the players with their tatoos and corn rows and baggy pants and assume they are all "gangsters", while the NFL gets away because we can't see it's players underneath helmets and pads and such. It can't simply be a race issue because the NFL and MLB consist of a majority of black players, but somehow or other the NBA is denigrated with a mishap like this, even if it only happens once or twice out of nearly 2500 games in a season, while every other sport sees it happen with much higher frequency and no one seems to notice or care. Why?
And now, a little NBA humor, courtesy of Argus Hamilton:
"NBA Commissioner David Stern agreed Monday to replace the synthetic basketball he forced on the league. He had vowed to stay the course but finally saw he was wrong. It looks like James Baker got better results with his Basketball Study Group."
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