Category Archives: Ron Artest

David Stern, Indiana Pacers, Los Angeles Lakers, Metta World Peace, NBA, Ron Artest

End the Era of World Peace

And that settles it.
The NBA – and David Stern specifically – have no spine.
There is no other conclusion to be made regarding the league and the man in charge after they took more than 48 hours to decide that Metta World Peace (the artist formerly known as Ron Artest) should receive a pathetic seven-game suspension for his vicious elbow to the head of James Harden on Sunday.
I read one columnist describe it as an “incident that was as ugly as they come in sports. Vicious, violent and wholly unnecessary.”
Man, that sounds oddly familiar.
Oh, right, World Peace was anything but peaceful during the Malace at the Palace in 2004. He was, however, vicious, violent and wholly unnecessary.
When are people going to get it? Rometta World Peaceatest is certifiably insane. And he has no business in a public forum to display his crazy.
Remember the speech from Nicole Kidman to Tom Cruise in “Days of Thunder” when he’s chasing the taxi cab? After she tries to bail out of a moving vehicle traveling at high speed, he follows her on foot and she breaks it down for him: He’s an infantile egomaniac and he’s scared. Control is an optical illusion that most people learn to cope with. And once you get a glimpse of it, the fear of the unknown sets in.
And Ron Artest is one scared individual.
He thanked his therapist after winning an NBA championship. My immediate question was: which one?
Forget all this crap about emotion and being excited he dunked over Kevin Durant. He violently jacked some dude in the side of the head, knocked him out and didn’t even offer to help him up.
Seven games? How about seven years? Ban this guy – for good.
And I’m a Lakers fan.
I’m also a fan of not wanting to see someone seriously hurt or injured at the hands of a man who’s been suspended 11 times in his career for over 100 games. Everything Artest does is unnecessary, just like his forearm shiver to JJ Barea last year that looked like a wrestling clothesline. I know it was the highly annoying JJ Barea, but still, we have to draw the line somewhere.
Punishment should fit the crime, in both civil and sport arenas.
Except if this was a civil issue, and Artest had a violent history like he does in the NBA, he’d be getting worse than seven games (or the equivalent of 15 days in jail and community service).
But the NBA does not think about morals, justice, right and wrong. It thinks about dollar signs and TV ratings. So it took 48 hours to decide that seven games was appropriate – because that amount of time won’t totally derail the Los Angeles Lakers title hopes.
If you are the Lakers, you can totally win a first round series against the Denver Nuggets without Metta World Peace/Ron Artest.
Can you get past the Oklahoma City Thunder in a potential Round 2? What about the San Antonio Spurs, Los Angeles Clippers or Memphis Grizzlies in the Western Conference Finals? Probably not.
And what looks better for the league? Lakers-Thunder in Round 2 or Nuggets-Thunder? How about Lakers-Clippers in the conference finals? Or Lakers-Grizzlies? Or a classic Lakers-Spurs series? What about the NBA Finals? More fans tuning in to see Lakers-Celtics or Lakers-Heat than, say, Grizzlies-Celtics? Spurs-Heat?
I’m not suggesting the playoffs are fixed. What I am suggesting is the NBA isn’t stupid. It sees the match-ups and it knows the Lakers – even with Artest/World Peace being a washed up has-been – stand a better chance of going deeper into the playoffs with World Peace than without him.
So let’s not pretend the punishment fit the crime and that seven games is supposed to deter The Artist Formerly Known as Ron Artest from doing, well, Ron Artest like things in the future.
There’s crazy and then there’s crazy.
And Metta World Peace is and always has been crazy.
He can change his name, dress up his charitable work, be an advocate for mental health awareness (ironic, since he has none) and pretend he’s not that same guy who charged into the stands eight years ago, but he is.
People who cover him in L.A. routinely mention you can see a different person in Ron Artest each day, you can see his inner conflict. He’s got an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, constantly battling each other.
He doesn’t know who he is. He responds to both Metta and Ron. When you’ve got dueling banjos upstairs, how do you that comes out when someone gets involved in an emotionally contested game against an upstart rival who wants to overthrow your team’s reign as the Western Conference dynasty?
I’ll tell you how it comes out: with one of the most vicious and nasty physical acts against another player I’ve seen since Kermit Washington decked Rudy Tomjanovich decades ago.
And the longer you let him have an opportunity to display his crazy, the more opportunity there is for him to play a game in his mind: how can I top that last one? How can I get more attention?
C’mon Stern, show some fortitude. 

End the era of World Peace in the NBA.
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Andrew Bynum, Dwayne Wade, Indiana Pacers, J.J. Barea, Jermaine O'Neal, Lamar Odom, LeBron James, Los Angeles Lakers, Rajon Rondo, Ron Artest

Something About Stones and Glass Houses

As sports fans, the collective lot of us sure have selective memories. How we define dirty play and label people has become mesmerizing.
It’s really a psycho-analysis of deeper issues. Take this past week in the NBA, for example.
Los Angeles Lakers center Andrew Bynum and forward Lamar Odom are facing somewhat deserved backlash following their actions that resulted in ejections during the Lakers Game 4 loss to the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference semifinals.
As the back-to-back defending champions went out with a whimper, Odom and Bynum decided to take their frustrations out physically on their opponents.
First, Odom body blocked Mavericks forward Dirk Nowitzki and was ejected with a flagrant foul – grade 2. Then, less than a minute later, the 285-pound, 7-foot Bynum delivered a nasty forearm shiver in the chest of Dallas guard J.J. Barea – while Barea was in mid-air. Naturally, Bynum was booted for his actions.
The NBA suspended Bynum for five games at the start of next season and fined him $25,000. Odom will likely receive a similar fate, only reduced in the number of games and fine.
Was it wrong? Yes. Was it dirty? Yes, absolutely.
But there is a growing number of people who are outraged by Bynum and Odom, calling them dirty players and the Lakers a classless franchise.
In fact, here’s a quote from a friend of mine:
“These guys are classless, embarrassing, and horrible examples to all the kids out there playing ball. I now officially HATE the Lakers.”
Really? Do we really want to go down that path?
Because I think we’re entering a dangerous area as fans when we start generalizing and making disingenuous blanket statements about people.
Bynum and Odom’s actions were certainly in poor taste, they were dirty plays and were uncalled for. They deserved to be fined and suspended. But until that moment, neither had shown anything remotely similar in their on-court behavior.
It’s ironic that the immediate media and fan backlash was nearly the exact opposite when compared to the infamous Indiana Pacers-Detroint Pistons brawl in November 2004.
The “Malice at the Palace” began with about 46 seconds remaining in the game, when Pistons center Ben Wallace was fouled from behind by Pacers forward Ron Artest. Wallace took exception and shoved Artest. As you would expect in the NBA, this led to a lot of pushing and shoving from the players on both teams.
Artest went over and laid down on the scorer’s table and put on a radio headset to speak with Pacers radio broadcaster Mark Boyle and a fan threw a cup of Diet Coke at Artest while he was laying on the table. Artest responded by bulldozing his way into the stands and punching the wrong person. Shortly behind him was teammate Stephen Jackson, who went into the stands, fists flying.
More players – from both teams – headed into the stands, with fans running onto the court to escape the frenzy. Artest was confronted by two fans on the court and teammate Jermaine O’Neal took a running start and decked one of them in the jaw. The game was called off, as the scene was complete chaos, with folding chairs and debris being hurled onto the floor. Nine people were injured.
Shall we reassess what we determine as classless and an embarrassment to an organization?
Not yet? Well, then by all means, let’s keep going.
The Pacers-Pistons post-game commentary was certainly interesting. Studio analysts John Saunders and Tim Legler laid the blame on the Pistons fans, with Saunders calling the fans “a bunch of punks.” Rarely at a loss for words, Stephen A. Smith said that some of the fans should be arrested. He made no mention of the players.
We all lose our cool, the difference is how far do we take it? Is either of these situations, Bynum/Odom or the “Malice at the Palace” acceptable? Of course not. But the point is there are varying degrees here and apparently it only took us seven years to forget that.

Within 48 hours, Bynum had called Barrea several times to apologize. He issued a public apology during his exit interview on Tuesday. 

“My actions…don’t represent me, my upbringing, this franchise or any of the Laker fans out there that want to watch us and want us to succeed,” Bynum said. “Furthermore, and more importantly, I want to actually apologize to J.J. Barea for doing that. I’m just glad that he wasn’t seriously injured in the event and all I can say is, I’ve looked at [the replay], it’s terrible and it definitely won’t be happening again.” 

Take that in contrast to this, from Jermaine O’Neal following the Pacers-Pistons brawl in 2004:

“We all knew the league is 80-85 percent black; we all know that,” O’Neal told the Indianapolis Star. “We didn’t talk about the baseball player [Texas Rangers relief pitcher Frank Francisco] just breaking a lady’s nose with a chair because she was talking. They didn’t talk about that for weeks, did they? Every day for six weeks, you see something on TV about it. They didn’t talk about [former St. Louis Blues player Mike Danton] trying to kill his agent. These are people that are not black, and that touched me a little bit because that’s totally unfair for this league to be judged off one incident.”

Race should have little to do with it. 

I said should, because on some level, it might. That brawl in 2004 brought some issues that had been bubbling for years to the surface, most notably, the declining relationships between fans who were (and are) mostly white and a league full of players who were (and are) mostly black. In addition to a league covered by a mostly white media and owners of teams who are white. So I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there could be some truth to what O’Neal said at the time. 

But race was used by O’Neal in the wrong way – as a distraction from the point at hand. Maybe the fans shouldn’t be throwing cups and maybe the players shouldn’t go charging into the stands looking to lay a Mike Tyson hook on someone. 

Just a thought.

Dirty plays have always been a lightning rod of conversation. We always want to know how mad the person on the receiving end was. We call the dirty play disher a cheap shot artist and embarrassing. But when it goes too far, it makes us uncomfortable, so we just write it all off as one and the same. 

It is not the same.

We call it dirty and classless when it happens on the court – when everything is at a distance. Remember the Miami Heat and New York Knicks brawls? Jeff Van Gundy wrapped around the legs of players? How about Charles Barkley fighting Shaquille O’Neal, or Kermit Washington decking Rudy Tomjanovich? 

If those situations happened post-Palace brawl, we might have reacted differently. Perhaps the outcry would have been much like it has been this week for the Lakers, Bynum and Odom. 

What can we take away from all of this? That we’re more sensitive now to on and off court physicality?
That may explain why nearly every game, if two players get wrapped up or someone goes down, there’s an overreaction – and then a chain reaction. 

Case in point: Boston Celtics guard Rajon Rondo gets hurt (dislocated elbow) after getting tangled up with Dwayne Wade in Game 3 last Saturday night. The fall is ugly, the injury nearly vomit inducing. Rondo comes back later in the game, is limited, but guts it out. When he returns, many members of the Heat, including Wade, check on him to make sure he’s OK. Game continues, Celtics win.

After the game, someone asks Wade, who’s sitting next to LeBron James, about the play and mentions the word “dirty”. James scoffs and mumbles, “That’s retarded.”

Boom – new controversy: LeBron James is insensitive to those with mental disabilities.

Sure enough, James started off his Game 4 post-game press conference issuing an apology. 

Sure enough, that story will grow. Someone will call it classless and embarrassing. 

The cycle will just continue until we’re all oversensitive to every little thing. 

On second thought…too late.

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