<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">CLEVELAND - Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony and others involved in a Madison Square Garden melee Saturday night will have to suck it up and live with the consequences, some members of the Cavaliers say. On Monday, NBA Commissioner David Stern suspended Anthony (15 games), his teammates J.R. Smith (10 games) and Nene (one game) and New York Knicks Nate Robinson (10 games), Mardy Collins (six games), Jared Jeffries (four games) and Jerome James (one game). The players were involved in a brawl that spilled over into the Garden crowd. In addition, the league fined each team $500,000. ``The suspensions have to be given out. These are grown men,'' Cavaliers forward LeBron James said. ``They're going to have to take their consequences. Take the suspension and be back on the court in no time.'' Center Zydrunas Ilgauskas said that the team knew that the penalties were coming and that they would be substantial, given that the fight took place in the commissioner's backyard. At the same time, both James and Ilgauskas said they understood how something like that could happen. The fight broke out after Collins' hard foul on Smith in a game the Nuggets had turned into a blowout. It escalated when Anthony sucker-punched Jeffries. ``In a sense, you have to protect your teammate,'' James said of Anthony's hit on Jeffries. ``It didn't look like an appropriate shot on Smith, so Melo being a leader has to protect his teammate.'' But James said there are ways to do that without turning it into something as ugly as what happened. Ilgauskas agreed. ``It's an emotional game. It doesn't matter if it's wrong or right, emotions take over,'' he said. ``I've been in situations like that myself -- you just lose your cool and stop thinking and obviously you look back and you wish you hadn't done those things.'' Emotions or not, James said, if the fight began because of the score, then the Knicks, as professionals, should have handled it better, even though they were getting pounded on the court. ``We're all NBA players. There's no such thing as a mercy rule in our league,'' he said. ``We have to go out and play. We can't say we're up this amount of points, get your starters out. That's up to the opposing head coach. If you're getting blown out, you're getting blown out. You shouldn't get beat that bad. Don't try to blame the other team because you're losing that bad.''</div> Source
one of the things i commend bron on is the fact that he seemingly evades bad press, in spite of his parents being ex cons.
He is good at handling the media. These questions were looking for something controversial. They either wanted him to condemn the commissioner or hang another NBA player out to dry. Most players end up getting caught in these questions, but he managed to give a pretty ambiguous answer.
