Second-Round Knockouts : Real Crime Is What Stern Did to Knicks

MIAMI —  We don’t get many of these legal fiascoes, so how to describe the NBA’s action, in which it suspended the New York Knicks’ top four scorers in the middle of the playoffs for their parts in a penny-ante scrum?

Draconian?

Looney Tunes?

A bunch of macho lawyers on a power trip?

As usual, the answer is D), all of the above. This wasn’t a case of the punishment fitting the crime. In this case, the devastating punishment dwarfed the puny crime.

Commissioner David Stern has been pursuing a worthy goal, eliminating fighting, and a league so inclined may have to err on the side of discipline once in a while, but that’s OK. After all, baseball still has a bench-clearing brawl every few weeks and hockey’s still hockey, while the NBA hasn’t actually had a fight that involved two punches in years.

Personally, however, I find flattening a franchise at a key point in the postseason a bit much.

First of all, this barely qualified as a fight. Charlie Ward leans into the knees of Miami Heat forward P.J. Brown. The mild-mannered Brown, who has been told the Knicks are out to make him look like a chump since Charles Oakley stepped over him in the preceding game, flips Ward over and dumps him off the court. Lots of Knicks come running over to break it up and, of course, pile on top in the process--but not a single punch is thrown.

Voila! The legalists in the league office, checking the videotape, find five Knicks who came off the bench--a breach of the rules, punishable by “automatic suspension.”

You’d think common sense would enter the process and mandate a reasonable penalty--say, one game for Brown, Ward and throw in John Starks, for getting ejected and making an obscene gesture to the crowd, just to balance it out.

Unfortunately, other considerations almost certainly entered the process--namely public relations. Last fall, baseball caught a world of grief when Roberto Alomar spit on an umpire and was allowed to participate in the playoffs and serve his suspension this spring. There was no way Stern was going that route.

The Knicks couldn’t have been in a worse position.

First, their real players were on the bench. The Heat was leading, 90-74, and Oakley had just been ejected for messing with Alonzo Mourning, so Knick Coach Jeff Van Gundy had his starting point guard, Chris Childs, in with Ward, Scott Brooks, Walter McCarty and John Wallace.

See, if Ewing had been playing and had gone over to break it up, it would have been OK. You just can’t leave the bench.

And the fight happened at the Knicks’ end of the floor, in front of their bench, doubling the temptation. Even Heat Coach Pat Riley, who suspects his former team of many nefarious things, agrees that hurt them.

“The proximity had something to do with it, we realize that,” Riley said. “. . . [But] that thing the league sends out to players is a very important piece of information to have. A lot don’t understand you can’t leave the bench.”

After the game, while media people were filing their accounts of the game, members of the Heat public relations staff fanned through the press room, distributing copies of “that thing,” the league’s anti-fighting rules, as a reminder of what the Knicks were facing.

Maybe the league owed Riley something for snatching Juwan Howard so precipitously last summer, ruling his Heat contract invalid rather than giving the Heat a chance to work something out.

If so, this wasn’t enough, but it’s a start. Of course, the Heat now will have to survive what promises to be a truly remarkable din in an outraged Madison Square Garden, so whatever it gained, it will have to pay for.

Suggestion for Solomon the Wise up there in the commissioner’s office: Next time, take a deep breath and count to 10.

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The Rule

“During an altercation all players not taking part in the game must remain in the immediate vicinity of the bench.

Violators will be suspended without pay for a minimum of one game and fined up to $20,000.”