I love to seee the "little' man stand up for the big guy.It's the fabric of our society. I think Dre maybe taught this team somethin.Love those crafty vets) BTW, I got two tickets for sale to Tues game in 200 section (MGB's) for $60.hit me back or at Barrett's site or at Twitter ,same moniker.as I am somewhat unfamiliar here.
Miller's bulldozing is the play of the season so far. Just LMAO. I love that guy. That said, I disagree with Minstrel that it isn't suspension-worthy. What if Shaq or Ilgauskas or Przybilla decided to pull that same move on a guy like Patty Mills? The dude would probably be in the hospital. It was only funny because it was an old PG doing it to a young PF. But if you flip it around and Blake did that to Miller, there's a good chance old man Miller leaves the game with a busted hip. That's the difference between what Miller did and an illegal pick. Illegal picks can be pretty violent because it's a big guy often laying a little wood on a small guy. But it's just a little wood (or in the world of physics, "inertia")--a large mass moving a short distance at a low speed into a small mass moving at a moderate speed. Relatively small amount of force is applied. If you get a large mass moving at a high speed into a small mass standing still, there's a lot more force at work, and a lot more potential damage. The only alternative to suspending Miller is to make a rule that goes something like this: "A smallish guy ramming into a big guy gets a tech. A biggish guy ramming into a smallish guy gets a suspension." That'd be pretty silly to try to enforce, because "biggish" and "smallish" have too much context and it makes it all to subjective. It's a lot simpler just to penalize everyone the same way for doing something that we all agree on is un-sportsmanlike. Besides, if you let Miller's actions go, it's not a big step for every team to add a goon to the squad whose primary job it is to go out and level a star player on the other team.
We just did. We added Joel. That changed the character of the whole team. Miller was just the first to perceive the new ethos. The other players will soon play tougher, too, following Joel's lead. Yesterday there was a thread about, what in the roster has changed from late last year, to give such different results? I mentioned Juwan. Now I see that even after Joel went out last year, the team continued to play in his bully boy style. Camby's style didn't take over till this season.
That's a perfectly reasonable point, but I disagree on two levels: 1. I don't think the severity is much as you claim, where if a big man did it to a small man (in the NBA, not saying random people in society) that it would very likely injure the small guy. I've seen guys like Shaq fly down the court to drill a guard that he thought undercut him on the other end. In the NBA, players are, on some level, aware that collision could happen at any time and they're top athletes...much more capable of dealing with unexpected collision, even big ones. 2. Potential damage you can knowingly inflict is reasonable to take into account. Black belt martial artists are charged with lethal assault for attacking people in hand to hand combat, whereas "normal" people would not be. Miller knows he's not 300 lbs and Griffin is not 150 lbs, so he knew his actions would not be as crushing as if that were the case. As to your hypothetical rule, I agree that it would be a mess, but I don't think the NBA has an elegant rule on the books currently that removes subjectivity. It's already, so far as I can tell, entirely up to the discretion of the NBA, so factoring in how much damage an action could do based on the people involved is not really problematic to me. For personal fouls, I agree with your general principle: certain things should be fouls, regardless of who did it or why. Flagrant fouls and suspensions (and technicals) strike me as more "meta-fouls"...they're fouls almost outside the game and require more context.
I miss the days when players would get into it a little bit. Because IMO, the only reason there are so many cheap shot artist in the NBA now is because they know there won't be retaliation. Guys like Trevor Ariza would have had his ass kicked a dozen times by now if he played a decade ago.
Stern thinks the fans don't like a fight now and then, so he made the league a police state. He thinks fans come to see the referees.
More specific, he thinks the fans like a free throw shooting contest. If you look at the way the league has gone, they have really in fact, rigged it so they can eat more of the players and coaches salary through fines. This is exactly why the referee's should be a separate organization from the nba. They have a conflict of interest. 50,000 dollar fines? Really? Do the players really do so much damage in one of these incidents that 5 season ticket holders at 10k apiece quit paying for their seats? Do they really reduce the TV revenew, or does the intensity it brings actually increase ratings?
Interesting cost-benefit analysis. Separating the referees wouldn't affect Stern's not-fine fine decisions, though. It's like requiring athletes to look like dorks in suits. Other sports don't do this. Fat Stern looks best in a suit, so he makes everyone into his own image. He's been King for so long that he can press his own personal traits onto us (his embarrassment from fights and his narcissism from clothes). He just claims that his personal preferences are what the fans want.
I don't know about that. Say it's a playoff series and you're facing Chris Paul. It's not hard to imagine a coach pulling one of his guys aside and saying, "Sweep the leg, Johnny" by sending some big guy to ram into him. Given Paul's history, it'd probably be the end of the season for him and the Hornets. I just think it's a bad idea to ever let players get away with this, regardless of circumstance, without a suspension. It just breeds an environment where my Chris Paul scenario becomes more plausible. I hadn't thought of breaking it up that way. Interesting to think about.
Suspension wouldn't prevent that, as a 12th man could be used for that. Trading your worst big man for their Chris Paul is good trade and there are probably more effective ways to hurt him...like actually punching and aiming for the head/face. I think what discourages that, whether by "ram" or by punch is that if it got out, it would be the end of the coach's career.
I don't think what Miller did was "dirty". Griffin's two strong pushes in the back against a smaller guy were dirty. Miller's play was just what needed to be done, since the referees weren't doing their job. Nobody should have been suspended, except maybe the referees.
Red Auerbach was famous for doing this often. He would have his 12th man harrass the opponent's star into a fight and get them both kicked out. Before Stern's police state, this was standard operating procedure.
No. No more than I wanna get a squeeze of your bitch titties. [video=youtube;wfONNfAjyrc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfONNfAjyrc[/video]
Would it be possible to petition the NBA to have a few more games added to Miller's suspension? I'd like to see the ball movement from last night for a few more games before we go back to snail ball.
Rudy Gay slammed Scola on Friday night. It was very similiar to the incident with Miller and Griffin. Gay got a flagrant 2 and was ejected... but will he be suspended? about 1:45 http://www.nba.com/video/games/rockets/2010/12/17/0021000389_mem_hou_recap.nba/index.html
