ronnymac2 wrote:As for the damage done...well, in my opinion, it was a terrible ruling. The league was almost finally rid of the boring Spurs in favor of a high-octane offense led by Steve Nash and A'mare Stouedmire, two exciting players. Tim Duncan's 14-foot bank shots and his disciplined defense where he reliably lowers the opponent's field goal percentage in the paint might win you games, but it ain't winning you fans or selling shoes.
The league did itself a disservice, and it didn't need to. Nobody would have done anything about it if they just said no, no suspensions, let's play Game 5. It's their call, their league, their business. They fiercely adhere to the rules that they make up on the spot anyway. Yet they screwed themselves and their corporate partners by making what was assuredly going to be the most competitive series of the remaining season end abruptly (for all intents and purposes).
And for what? Nothing egregious even happened. If anything, you got a great piece of theater with Nash getting back up to challenge the bigger guy, and this after earlier in the series with the bloody nose. A real miss.
Now, to answer a different question: If the league is genuinely, purely trying to adhere to the ruleset it has created, then those PHX players absolutely should have been suspended. I think the main problem was that the league dug themselves a hole they didn't know how to get out of. That rule was too extreme in the first place.
What I'd say is that Stern saw the players as children to be controlled lest they become violent and scare away the money, and so being unreasonably rigid & punitive was not a bug but a feature. The fact that a ham-fist rule likely changed the champion of a particular season mattered little to him compared to sending the message that the NBA meant business with every rule in put in place.
There's absolutely something to admire about that, but when you make rules that don't properly take into account unconscious human response and then let them swing the competitions that are supposed to be at the center of what you preside over, well, there's absolutely no reason anyone should defend that. Poor vision mixed with stubbornness is a recipe for stumbling and falling into a pit.
I mean I don't even think it did change the outcome. Diaw and Amare were back in game 6, and Horry was still out suspended, and the Spurs won game 6 pretty easily.
We'll never know for sure, but either way the Suns were a championship level team. I think plenty of other years they'd have won it all.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
One_and_Done wrote:I mean I don't even think it did change the outcome. Diaw and Amare were back in game 6, and Horry was still out suspended, and the Spurs won game 6 pretty easily.
We'll never know for sure, but either way the Suns were a championship level team. I think plenty of other years they'd have won it all.
I think it's fine for you to believe the Spurs would most likely have won the series regardless. I'd guess most see it that way, and you're being more charitable than many in stating up front that you think the Suns could have won a title.
I would point attention to the phenomenon where a team gives everything they have to try to win Game X, fail, and then go on to Game X+1. Pretty common to see them do worse in X+1.
If you look at the minutes in Game 5, you can see that the Suns played their main guys considerably more than the Spurs played their main guys. It was a classic "must win game" for the Suns where they put everything into it. Had they won the game, there's have been no doubt that the Suns would essentially punt Game 6 to conserve energy for Game 7.
As I say all that, Ginobili had a tendency to kill the Suns, and kill them he did in those final two games. It's possible that nothing was going to stop him.
DirtyDez wrote:Don’t forget about Nash nose bleed in game 1 that they couldn’t stop so he was on the bench in crunch time. All time mind **** series for Suns’ fans.
If Suns fans want to blame someone for not winning a title, tell them to blame Sarver. The 2007 Suns could have featured a starting line-up of Nash, Amare, Marion, Iggy & R.Bell, with Diaw, Rondo, Gortat, KT/Q.Rich, R.Lopez & Barbosa off the bench.
Warspite wrote:Billups was a horrible scorer who could only score with an open corner 3 or a FT.
I have several more ad hoc thoughts on the topic, too.....
1) I completely agree the rule [or something very similar to it] exists for good reason. A number of those fights you mentioned are seemingly what [collectively] triggered the rule in the first place, based on what I’m reading. Things were getting a little out of control in the early-mid 90s.
2) Amar'e subsequently said he was unaware of the rule (or at least the full implication of it), and I mostly believe him on that. He [and the Suns organization] have also said he was merely running over to check on Steve Nash. That I am more skeptical of. He might have been, but it’s certainly not clear based on the video, and he does appear to “benefit” a little from restraint. He doesn’t exactly appear to be seeing red or spoiling for a fight, though.
3) Boris Diaw, as far as “players leaving the bench and coming on to the court” is concerned: he doesn’t actually come on to the court. Except for ONE foot that momentarily touches down on the court, he’s otherwise still on the sideline, and probably <15’ from the end of the bench at all times, never actually getting close to the “fracas”.
Right after the Horry cheap-shot, he pops up off the bench and quickly advances maybe 2-3 strides towards the action before visibly catching himself and turning around (back toward the bench). No restraint was necessary; he seemed about to return to the bench on his own, before almost getting propelled a step or two closer to the action by the rush of coaches/trainers who—in their effort to reach Stoudemire—bump into him.
As Doctor MJ said (quoted below): that is EXACTLY the considered response you want from players; exactly the behaviour the rule was intended to inspire. In essence, Diaw’s response was perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the rule; and they punished him anyway.
As a result of these observations, his suspension is much harder for me to swallow than Stoudemire’s.
4) Aside from the fact that we’re still (nearly two decades later) talking about this in mostly unflattering terms….. That the rule—or rather: the way it was interpreted and enforced at the time—was wrong-headed seems obvious based on the fact that softening the interpretation was one of the first things Adam Silver did, and also based on the fact that Stu Jackson himself [I think very shortly after the event] acknowledged that “the rule needed revisiting” (this is quoted in one of the very articles O&D linked in OP).
Translation: he knew, on some level, that the ruling he’d handed down had been wrong, and unfair, and bad for basketball. He thus understood that the rule [or how it’s interpreted and enforced] needed some re-tooling. He perhaps wasn’t creative or assertive enough to know exactly what the rework should be (and perhaps Stern was applying too much pressure toward “zero tolerance”). But he acknowledged that outcomes with it were substantially less than ideal.
5)
lessthanjake wrote:
Spoiler:
It was a silly decision that the league made to enforce the letter of the law on a rule without regard to the intent of the rule. People saying that it was consistent with how the rule had been enforced in the past aren’t really able to come up with examples of players being suspended where they left the bench and did not participate in a fight in any way. And frankly, if it were consistently enforced like that, then one should be able to come up with a *huge* number of examples of suspensions for it, since it is a common occurrence.
In any event, this is going to get in the weeds of legal analysis basically, but even by the letter of the rule, the NBA did not actually have to suspend them. This is because it did not actually have to define the incident as an “altercation,” or it could have defined Amare and Diaw as having left the bench before an “altercation” began and therefore that the rule didn’t apply in a way that required suspension.
The NBA’s rules don’t define an “altercation” except in one portion of the rules about instant replays, where they define it as being an incident where either “(i) two or more players are engaged in (a) a fight or (b) a hostile physical interaction that is not part of normal basketball play and that does not immediately resolve by itself or with intervention of game officials or players, or (ii) a player, coach, trainer, or other team bench person commits a hostile act against another player, referee, coach, trainer, team bench person, or spectator (including, for example, through the use of a punch, below, kick, blow to the head, shove, or thrown object.”
Was there ever actually an “altercation” here? Part (i) of the definition doesn’t really apply, since there was not actually a “fight.” And the hip check was a hard/flagrant foul but was still “part of a normal basketball play” rather than being some extracurricular activity outside of normal play. Other than the hip check, not much actually happened except (a) Horry getting in Raja Bell’s face and putting his forearm on Bell’s shoulder, and (b) Nash getting up and running at Horry and getting pulled away. It’s debatable whether either of those qualify as a “hostile physical interaction,” but to the extent they did qualify as one, then it’d be hard to truly argue it didn’t “immediately resolve by itself or with intervention of game officials or players,” since the Horry/Bell thing was a very brief interaction, and Nash was immediately pulled away when he ran at Horry. Meanwhile, part (ii) doesn’t really have to apply to the flagrant foul on Nash, since, while a flagrant foul, it is not really a “hostile act” in the way the rule is referring to (it didn’t involve a “bench person” and a “hostile act” is more than a flagrant foul—this wasn’t some physical assault in line with the specific examples given). So then what’s the relevant “hostile act?” Horry putting his forearm on Bell’s shoulder? That doesn’t seem like a truly “hostile act” at the level of the specific examples given. And Nash was obviously pulled away before he committed a “hostile act.”
So the league could’ve ruled that there simply was not an “altercation” at all, in which case the rules on suspensions for leaving the bench “during an altercation” would squarely not apply at all.
But let’s say the league did rule that there was an altercation. There’s two general options for what triggered it being an “altercation.” The first is the hip check itself being an altercation. The second is the post-hip check stuff: i.e. (a) Horry getting in Bell’s face, or (b) Nash running at Horry and being pulled away. As explained above, it’s a tough argument to say that the hip check itself made it an “altercation” within the meaning of the rules. And if that didn’t trigger it and Horry getting in Bell’s face afterwards or Nash running at Horry is what made it an “altercation,” then I believe Amare and Diaw were actually already off the bench when the “altercation” began. And that means it’s not really clear that the rule would squarely apply to them. After all, the rule says that all players not participating in the game “must remain in the immediate vicinity of their bench” during an altercation. But what happens if they’re already not in the immediate vicinity of their bench when the altercation begins? This is a grey area in the rule, because the rules’ language about where a player must “remain” clearly presupposes that the player is in the immediate vicinity of the bench when the “altercation” began. It doesn’t contemplate this scenario. While the rule doesn’t actually speak to this scenario, presumably a player that starts outside the bench area would have to go back to the bench area at some point in order to avoid triggering the rule. But it’s not clear what the exact standard for that is. Which means the NBA absolutely could’ve had room within the letter of the rule to say that they began outside the bench area when the “altercation” began and that they went back to the bench area in a quick and orderly enough fashion that the rule didn’t actually apply to them. And given that they did not get involved in a fight and didn’t stay off the bench for long, that wouldn’t be a remotely unreasonable interpretation.
And I’d say that when there’s perfectly reasonable textual interpretations of the rule that would prevent it from being applied in a manner that clearly was not intended (not to mention unfair, given what team was going to benefit from the suspensions), then the NBA should’ve taken one of those interpretations. The fact that it did not is kind of ridiculous to me, and I do think that there’s a good chance it cost the Suns a title.
Doctor MJ wrote:
Spoiler:
Ah, so, begin rant:
The rule in question was not a bad rule IF it wasn't supposed to be taken literally...but Stu Jackson under David Stern interpreted it literally, and this was a horrible, horrible thing.
Why? Because a literal interpretation of the rule meant penalizing players for instantaneous reaction rather than conscious decision making despite the fact that the actual harm the rule was intended to prevent was entirely about conscious decision making.
When Amar'e & Diaw ran on to the floor, and then ran back off when they realized the issue with what they'd done, this was precisely the behavior the NBA should have been hoping for, and them correcting their initial mistake made actual discipline unnecessary.
To be clear: There are rules that exist that involve instantaneous reaction. Most of the punches thrown in NBA history were instantaneous things, and obviously that didn't make them okay. But the rule in question here existed precisely to avoid the situation where such punches would be thrown...and of course that's precisely what it did on this occasion, so again, it all went just as it should have been intended, and no punishment should be given.
There's a deeper level to this that further explains why the instantaneous reaction is not what should be punished here:
Robert Horry of the Spurs is the one who actually committed the original physical foul that could have hurt an opponent. General common sense rule should be that whenever one player initiates violence, there should never be a situation where that action ends up benefitting the team through officiating unless the opponent escalates the situation with greater violence, because otherwise you are incentivizing the manipulation of the refs by players with violence.
All of that represents why the NBA was in the wrong when they interpreted their own rule literally - and why the rule was poorly worded if literal interpretations were expected - and the actual damage of the event is something else.
But what was that damage? In a nutshell: In a year where there were only 2 serious contenders left in the playoffs in the 2nd round, and they were playing in the 2nd round, they allowed a player's (Horry's) bad behavior to swing the odds of his team winning the series to go from below 50% to way above 50%, and thus swing their likelihood being champions from "probably not" to "probably".
But of course it's worse than that because the team that this hurt was THE "pace and space" team - the style of play that would eventually be demonstrated to be the clear cut more optimal way top play over other styles played at the time - and as a result of not winning the title that year along with the massive shade being thrown at the Suns for their "gimmick" style by NBA people who "knew" a lot of things that were false, the Suns gave up on pace & space. They traded the fast Shawn Marion for the ultra-slow obese-Shaq, soon got rid of pace & space architect Mike D'Antoni, and basically clinched the narrative that the Suns "couldn't win because jump shot shooting teams can't win" which we know now definitively to be about as wrong as it could possibly be.
This then to say that because the NBA was stupid about their rule, they ended up holding back progress for another decade even after all the analytics made clear the direction the basketball needed to head.
And of course, the fact that in the next regime the NBA didn't stick with the same approach only hammers in how arbitrary everything they did in this event was. This wasn't a group that knew exactly what it was doing. These are human beings who got where they are either by going to law school ("Nothing But Attorneys") or playing nice with those who did, and in general there's no reason to think that when something seems fundamentally basketball-silly that "they must know what they're doing".
Some fine points made by both of you. I like the phrase of “getting into the weeds of legal analysis”, because this actually gets into my professional wheelhouse a little. The last few years I’ve been in regulatory work: much of my job is interpreting regulations, verifying and [as needed] enforcing compliance to those regs within my field (forgive me if I don’t wish to provide more personal details).
But as LTJ implied, there’s plenty of wiggle room for interpretation, arbitration, and judgement when it comes to enforcing these things. The NBA just has to have the will and minds to do what is best for the game, rather than hiding behind a “one size fits all” dispensary of punishment.
Within my work, we don’t see any little technical non-compliance to a regulation—however small—and dole out a uniform enforcement action applicable to ALL instances associated with that reg. A TON of things are considered:
*Was “harm” caused? If so, how severe? **If harm wasn’t caused, what was the potential for harm related to the non-compliance? And what would the severity of that potential harm have been? ***Was the non-compliance the result of intention or overt negligence? (this is a big one) ****What is the party’s compliance history with regards to the transgressed regulation? *****Who alerted the party to the non-compliance (did they notice it themselves, or did they have to be informed by the regulatory body I work for)? ******What interim corrective measures did they take once the issue was detected? *******What long-term actions have been taken? ********Are they cooperating with our evidence/information-obtaining activities? *********Was the non-compliance reasonably predictable [to occur at some point] in the circumstances, or was it something more sporadic (accident, equipment failure, etc)? **********What safeguards are/were in place to prevent it? ***********Are there special extenuating circumstances that could/should have made the non-compliance more or less likely?
…..And so on. There are SO MANY considerations that inform how we would respond.
Obviously, a fracas in a basketball game is a very different circumstance than what I deal with at work. But as a thought exercise, perhaps think of all the different questions you might ask regarding a “fracas” and a bench player’s response to it.
You should be able to come up with quite a few. And in answering those questions you’d find that we’re often not comparing apples to apples. Some reactions [and circumstances] are FAR different from others. So why then are we TREATING them all like apples?
It’s about sound judgement. Falling back on “well, this is the way we’ve done it before” is a crutch, and a bad one. It’s that kind of thinking that has allowed any number of awful practices to perpetuate for generations.
Getting the decision RIGHT is a helluva lot more important than getting it consistent with prior decision-making.
@lessthanjake - would you be able to provide a link to the source you have that shows all the “legalese” wording of the rule.
All of the grey areas you described are valid considerations (e.g. what constitutes a “hostile physical interaction”? Where does the “vicinity of the bench” end? etc).
One additional question I’d be curious about in the wording of the rule: so it’s an automatic 1-game suspension for leaving the “vicinity of the bench” during a physical altercation…….but does the rule specifically state that the game a player is suspended for MUST be the very next game played? Because if not, here also is a place the league could have arbitrated a more fair outcome: they could have said, for example, that Amar’e and Diaw are going to be suspended one game each; but to avoid dramatically altering playoff outcomes, that suspension will be executed at the start of the following regular season. I’d have been fine if they gave Robert Horry the same delayed punishment, too (though obviously he needed to be immediately ejected from game 4).
6) How might opinions of this outcome have been affected if Steve Nash had been seriously injured on that play?
This was a thuggish play by Robert Horry. It’s possibly down-played about just how rotten it was because ultimately Nash was not hurt. But even LESSER contact on a more legitimate “basketball play” can potentially cause serious injury. Example:
Again, in my line of work we don’t ONLY look at harm, we look at potential for harm. And there was a lot of potential with what Horry did.
That Diaw got one game for basically doing what you’d hope bench players would do, and Horry got just one more in addition to that for what he did…….
"The fact that a proposition is absurd has never hindered those who wish to believe it." -Edward Rutherfurd "Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
In terms of the definition of “altercation,” as I mentioned in my post it’s actually undefined in the rules, except in one portion of the rules about instant replays. You can find that here: https://official.nba.com/rule-no-13-instant-replay/. It is Section 1(a)(4). I should note that the rule actually specifies that the definition of “altercation” applies “for purposes of this instant replay rule only.” So that definition doesn’t actually have to apply (and indeed the rule suggests it doesn’t). But I also used the search function on that site for the entire set of rules for the word “altercation,” and there is no other definition for it that I can find. The upshot is that there’s a good argument that the definition of “altercation” that I analyzed doesn’t apply (though it is probably a good guide as to what the NBA understands the term to mean), and that the term is actually undefined. From a legal analysis standpoint, that’s a little frustrating, but if there’s no definition of the term, then that actually would’ve given the NBA even *more* leeway to just say that what happened didn’t rise to the level of an altercation, or that the altercation occurred after Amare/Diaw were already off the bench and that they went back quickly enough (and without doing anything bad) such that the rule wasn’t triggered.
One final thing I’d mention is that I don’t think the rules give them any leeway on *when* the suspensions would’ve happened. Rule 12 Part A Section VII(c)(1) provides that “The suspensions will commence prior to the start of their next game.” So I think once they decided to suspend under that rule, the rules do require that it had to be the next game.
____________
More generally, I just want to add a quick perspective that backs yours regarding how similar types of decisions aren’t typically just made using completely rigid application of rules with no thought to other more nuanced factors/considerations. I’m a litigator so I’m obviously not the one making the decisions in my cases (unlike you, it sounds like, in your area), but years ago I was a law clerk for a federal appellate court judge, and so in that job I did directly see quite a bit of how court decisions were made by an assortment of judges (the courts of appeal have panels of 3 judges for each case and each judge’s chambers goes back and forth on stuff for these cases, so you definitely get a sense of the thought-process for a lot more than just the judge you clerk for). And one thing I was really struck by back then is how much a basic sense of fairness came into play for the judges. There were plenty of cases where the court rigidly applied a legal rule. But sometimes, rigid application of the law was going to lead to an outcome that the judges simply felt wasn’t fair, and in those instances I have to say that that sense of fairness generally won the day. And, more indirectly, I can say that I often feel like that sort of thing is clearly motivating judges in the cases I litigate now, and it’s something I have to be very sensitive to. So I just think it’s very common in all kinds of similar types of decision-making (whether the type you discussed or what I briefly mentioned above) for decision-makers to step back and consider the fairness/equities/context of each particular application of a rule, rather than just rigidly applying the rule without any regard to that stuff. And I think the NBA should’ve done the same in this instance, and that they had some plausible legal interpretations they could’ve made to get them there.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
