David Stern still has it wrong... on leaving the bench rules

So news comes out today that David Stern (NBA Commissioner) and the NBA are considering tweaks to the NBA draft rules to maintain competitive balance and to help keep the NBA draft lottery odds from being a consideration for teams that have played poorly throughout the year.

Stern and the NBA are concerned that some teams may be coasting at the end of the season and not playing competitively when they could and should because they'd blow their chance at having better odds in the draft lottery.  As things currently stand, the worse a team does, the better their odds at getting the #1 pick in the NBA's draft lottery, though nothing is guaranteed as those ping pong balls can pop-out in any random order and there are so many chances give to all of the 'bad' teams as to keep the odds from really favoring any team over another in a predictable manner.

I would applaud the NBA for looking at their draft lottery and considering making changes that ensure that fans get to see better game play by *all* teams as the season winds down, but just as soon as that attaboy would be forthcoming (even though no changes have been made in this area yet), I'd have to take it back and then some for Stern's stupidity regarding the NBA's hard and fast 'leaving the bench during altercation' rules.  The same rules that basically hosed the Phoenix Suns in this season's playoffs when they lost two important team members (ok, one very important team member, and one primarily a bench-sub player) for one of the key games in their playoff series against the San Antonio Spurs.

If Stern and company don't have the brains to have their on-court arbiters of justice determine if players are *escalating* an on-court altercation, and/or if the players are actually trying to participate in such an altercation in any manner other than pulling their own players (team members) back away from the fight then why even bother having the Referees on the damned court?

Common sense would dictate that a *reasonable* individual could tell if a player that made the mistake of walking onto the court to check on the health of a teammate was trying to participate in a fight versus simply checking on their teammate.  It was pretty obvious for those that saw the highlights of the events that got the two Suns players suspended that they weren't trying to fight anyone.  They were headed to check on their star teammate.  Yet, the NBA turned a blind eye on justice and simply handed down punishments saying their rules have no gray areas and can't be interpreted during implementation of penalties.

That is complete crap.  What is even more crap is Stern basically saying those rules don't need to be revisited and weren't unfairly applied given this most recent situation.  Actually, excuse me, I guess I have to admit the rules weren't unfairly applied, just that the application of the rules was incredibly unfair to the team that saw their star player injured on a play that really shouldn't have happened as it did and really should have led to more serious fines and suspensions of the player involved, his coach, and the team owner.

Am I going too far in saying the coach and owner of the Spurs should have paid for Robert Horry's somewhat dirty play?  Maybe, but then again how was the NBA not going too far in suspending the Suns players and leaving them without their big gun going into a crucial (for them) playoff game?

Justice would have been that the referees be able to determine when a person is headed onto the court to fight, and when a person is merely checking out a teammate.  It's a natural instinct to head to the playing field to check on an injured player.  That the NBA has done everything possible to stop that is not necessarily a bad thing as it has helped to clean up the game, but at the same time justice would have been that the Suns players served an appropriate penalty, perhaps a hefty fine for *walking onto the court during an altercation* versus a hefty suspension and fine for *participating in and/or escalating an on-court altercation*

How the NBA can't differentiate between these actions and hand-out more reasonable penalties is beyond me, as it is cheapening their product, impacting their competition and their playoffs and making the NBA look like a league that manipulates results all the more.  Something they claim to be very much against and something they deny over and over again (as conspiracy theorists still talk about frozen envelopes being pulled to manipulate draft results in prior years....)