Listening to yesterday's Pardon The Interruption on my mp3 player coming into work this morning. David Stern on the suspensions: "Both the letter and the spirit of the rule is, Thou Shalt Not Leave The Bench."
That's, ummm, the stupidest thing I have ever heard. The letter of the law regarding driving is Thou Shalt Drive On The Right Side Of The Road. The spirit, however, is that you shouldn't drive on the side of the road that requires you to go opposite of the way everyone else is driving. That's why, if you end up in some crazy traffic zone where you are briefly driving on the left, the solution is not to charge across traffic cones to be on the Right Side. The solution is to drive whichever way everyone else is driving. You won't get pulled over if you're doing that.
In this case, the spirit of the rule is that you should not leave the bench area and exacerbate the already-high tensions in an altercation that has begun. Because it leaves too much to the judgement of the viewer to say that, we say 'don't leave the bench during an altercation.' But the goal of the rule is not to keep everyone on the bench. If, during an altercation, Amare Stoudemire started doing cartwheels down the sideline, would this make the situation any worse? No, of course not. So the rule needs to have the flexibility to allow for situations where a player might leave the bench without contributing to the tensions and not get punished, at the commish's discretion.
Stern lost about 50 points in my esteem last night, especially when Phoenix lost the game mostly because Nash ran out of gas late in the fourth and simply couldn't get anything done anymore, and they blew an 11-point lead. If the Spurs win this series, I'm done with the NBA for the year.
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Of course, that just puts more onus on the refs et al during a possibly tense situation. I say, if two guys are going at it dress one up as a Thracian and the other as a Hoplomachi and have the announcer scream "It's go time" over the PA. The one that survives (assuming that they don't kill each other) was clearly right. The widow will receive a ham. Mmmm... ham.
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