OAKLAND, Calif. — Blame the 1990s. It was over the course of that decade that a number of high-profile and ugly postseason ruckuses (the Pistons vs. everybody, the Knicks vs. the Bulls, the Knicks vs. the Heat) forced NBA commissioner David Stern to make the rules involving on-court player conduct more rigid.
The goal was to put rules on altercations into plain black and white, so that everyone — players, coaches, media, fans — knew what the consequences of a thrown punch or a bum’s rush off the bench would be.
Remove the gray area, the thinking went, and coaches would drill into players the facts of what is strictly prohibited by the league office, and the schedule of fines and suspensions would be explicit. That way, when the NBA had to discipline players, league observers could not criticize the decisions because those decisions would not be subjective. They’d be right there in black and white.
Indeed, over the last 25-plus years in the league, ugly, all-out playoff brawls have mostly disappeared. That's a good thing. We can thank the tiers of flagrant fouls and the technical foul tracker for that.
But what we are left with is a system of punishment that is too unbending. We have too much black and white. What we should be advocating in the NBA is the return of some gray area, the allowance for some subjectivity in these decisions.
This became relevant after Game 1 of the NBA Finals. At the end of the game with 2.6 seconds to play and the contest decided, Shaun Livingston launched a meaningless shot. As he did, he was given a hard foul by Cavs center Tristan Thompson. Ref Tony Brothers stepped in and, as he explained it, thought Thompson was leading with his elbow toward Livingston’s head. He gave Thompson a Flagrant 2 foul and an automatic ejection, which looked like an overreaction.
Thompson did not leave the floor quickly. Worse, he began jawing with the Warriors’ Draymond Green and wound up shoving the ball into Green’s face.
While that was going on, Cavaliers forward Kevin Love, who was not in the game, was standing on the court. He’d been on the floor even before the brief Thompson-Green scuffle, but was, technically, not in the bench area. By a strict reading of the rules, Love could be up for a suspension, too.
Kevin Love told me he left the bench in OT to argue the call on Tristan, walking onto the court to get in the officials' eyeline, not in reaction to any scuffle & before it even broke out. Video (via @bballbreakdown) seems to back this up; not sure if it will matter to the league pic.twitter.com/JeHmd6Fl2p
— Rachel Nichols (@Rachel__Nichols) June 1, 2018
This is where we are desperately in need of some gray area on the NBA’s part, some thoughtful subjectivity that considers the spirit of the rules as well as the words that make up those rules. Because though Thompson and Love could be suspended, logic dictates that they should not be suspended. A strict reading of the rules, however, precludes the injection of logic into league disciplinary proceedings.
The rules against players leaving the bench area was enacted to keep players from joining in a brawl. Love was clearly not joining a brawl — he’d been simply meandering on the court because he thought the game was about to end.
There is a stronger case for a Thompson suspension, but even in his situation, that punishment would not fit the spirit of the kind of actions the rule was designed to prevent. The video shows that it takes Thompson a few seconds after the flagrant-2 is called on him to realize that he’s been ejected.
About seven seconds later, he is walking toward the locker room (on the opposite side of where he was standing) when Green says something and begins clapping in Thompson’s face. That’s when the push happens. That scrum is quickly broken up, and Thompson resumes heading off the floor. The whole thing goes for about 16 seconds.
If Thompson had not just gotten flagrant foul, the shove on Green would have warranted a technical foul, at worst. It would have been a long way from a suspension. There was no fight, no punches thrown, no one rushing from the bench, no coaches on the floor grabbing Green’s leg to pull him away.
There should be no suspension, not of Thompson (add a technical foul to his docket) nor of Love. That’s common sense.
(UPDATE: Love will not be suspended for leaving the bench area, according to multiple reports. The NBA fined Thompson $25,000 late Friday but did not suspend him. It also reduced his foul to a Flagrant 1.)
But common sense does not always rule the day. Back in April, just before the playoffs started, Stu Jackson was reflecting on one of the more difficult periods of his professional career. Jackson had been the NBA's executive vice president of basketball operations for 13, and one of his most visible duties was doling out punishment to players who break league rules.
He was in charge in the 2007 playoffs, during one of the most controversial uses of a suspension in NBA history when the league axed Suns star Amar'e Stoudemire and role player Boris Diaw for leaving the bench after the Spurs’ Robert Horry hip-checked point guard Steve Nash into the sideline in Game 4 of the conference semifinals.
The series was tied, the Spurs beat Phoenix in Game 5 without Diaw and Stoudemire and San Antonio won the series in six games, keeping that Suns team from what was likely its best chance at the Finals.
Jackson still has some ambivalence about the decision to suspend Diaw and Stoudemire. What we’re calling black-and-white, he called a “bright line.” Either way, there was no room for common sense, no room to ask whether Diaw and Stoudemire had left the bench to fight (they hadn't) or to help their teammate (they had).
“It truly was a bright line,” Jackson said. “The one piece that gets lost (is), if you leave the vicinity of the bench, it is a one-game suspension. As much as we tried, understanding the ramifications of player suspensions in that series, as much as we tried to not suspend players in that case, at the end of the day, you were left with no choice.”
That’s the problem here. The NBA decision-makers (Kiki Vandeweghe has Jackson's job now, and Adam Silver has Stern’s) should never be in a position in which it has "no choice" but to do something dumb. The league office, of course, is in charge of what happens in the league, and if it wants to introduce some gray area into how these judgments are made, it can do so.
Neither Thompson nor Love did anything that warrants anything close to a suspension. Common sense makes that clear. Let’s start including that in how the league arrives at these decisions.