What Is Your Most Unreal Moment As An NBA Fan?
I'd say it was when Stu Jackson came out during the 2007 playoffs and suspended Amar'e & Diaw - thereby effectively ending the playoffs 2 & 1/2 rounds before the champion was crowned - by emphasizing that while this may not fit with the spirit of the law, it did fit with the letter of the law, and that was what was important.
1. It was such a bad move from a perspective of giving fans the best basketball, and everyone knew it.
2. The entire phrase spirit vs letter of the law exists to emphasize that the spirit is always what actually matters, and he was going completely against that. There's never a time in history where someone who explicitly emphasized the letter over the spirit would not be looked at as a buffoon.
3. Literally every single time anything like this happened again, the NBA ignored the letter of the law, thereby demonstrating that future NBA leadership understood that their prior decision was ridiculous.
4. The NBA making this decision led to the Suns blowing up their pace & space model, which some of us at the time, and basically everyone in the NBA now, recognize as the superior strategy to what other NBA teams were doing before. By making the decision they did while pushing Suns ownership behind the scenes to abandon the "gimmick", the NBA delayed the evolution of the league for another 8 years, and could have delayed it far long than that.
5. This despite the fact that the pace & space model was literally part & parcel with the rule changes of 2001 that David Stern greenlit, revealing that Stern really didn't have a coherent basketball vision at all - which makes sense given the fact that he was just a bossy little lawyer man more concerned with not upsetting corporate types than he was with actually thinking through the game itself.
6. The league decided to do what they did in 2007 because they were more concerned with convincing wealthy Whites that they had the thugs under control in the wake of Malice at the Palace. Understandable business wise, but unbelievably frustrating as an actual basketball fan.