Basketball's Falling

I've been waiting to talk about this problem for a long time, and maybe after an NBA Finals is not the best time to bring it up, but I've recently been exposed to a series of videos that's riled me up so much to the point where I can't wait any longer.  The problem: flopping.  And the worst offender in the league just won the NBA Finals.  Before I experience inevitable backlash or support for this statement let me just make one thing clear: the Heat didn't win because of flopping, they won because they were the best team in the league with the best player in the league.  Flopping didn't play a factor, in fact, the Heat had less noticeable flopping in this series with the Thunder, when it mattered most, than at any other time during the season.  But in the first few series of the playoffs and throughout this year, the flops were everywhere.  Whenever there was physical contact and a referee wasn't around, it seems like the Heat players would fall or contort their bodies to make it seem as if they'd been hit.  Here, judge for yourselves: http://www.complex.com/sports/2012/06/video-a-history-of-miami-heat-playoff-flops/ (WARNING: These videos will make you disgusted in ways you never originally felt possible).

And one of the worst parts is that the worst offenders are the superstars of the team, namely Dwyane Wade and LeBron James.  You have to think that the problem stems from Wade, whose infamous leg kick (which is exemplified in Video 18) of the video series above, and contortions of his body (seen in Videos 15 and 14 specifically) have been getting him calls for years.  But, no matter who started it all, LeBron James and almost everyone on the Heat have bought into the system.  

But possibly the worst part about this is that Pat Riley helps run this team.  The same Pat Riley whose Knicks teams in the 90s were about as violent and nasty as any other teams in the history of basketball.  God knows how many flops this Heat team would have had against them.  But you can be sure that Charles Oakley would have almost certainly punched everyone on the Heat roster in the face by this point, as a result of his disgust with the flopping.

But, of course it's not just the Heat that are contributing to this awful phenomenon; flopping started gaining steam earlier this decade and has been visible in the league for longer than that.  One of the biggest floppers the NBA has ever seen is Vlade Divac, the Serbian big man who became popular for falling like a ton of bricks.  And speaking of Divac, there is a bit of a pattern that's developed with flopping in the NBA.  One of the sports in which flopping is most prevalent is soccer.  Flopping has become an engrained part of soccer, and happens multiple times each game.  So it's no surprise that many of the game's notorious floppers have been players who hail from soccer-loving countries; Manu Ginobili and Luis Scola from Argentina, Anderson Varejao from Brazil.  Just look at this player poll and you'll see most egregious floppers hail from soccer-loving countries: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_gallery/1104/nba.biggest.flopper/content.1.html.  That's not to say that all floppers are foreign-born; many and probably most floppers are American-born including Reggie Miller, Bill Laimbeer, most of the Heat players, and almost every player Mike Krzyzewski has ever coached at Duke.

The point is that flopping has become an epidemic in basketball and it's hurting a game that's on the precipice of skyrocketing in popularity in this country - just look at the TV ratings for this Finals, the highest since the 2004 Finals.  And that's with a Thunder team that hails from Oklahoma City, which is arguably the smallest market in professional sports.  The last thing a league with so many rising young stars needs is those rising young stars literally falling into the flopping craze.  Some people talk about players doing a good job "selling it" and doing whatever it takes to win but the truth is what's happening here isn't basketball and has no place in the game.  Basketball is a physical game, much more so than games like soccer.  And there's bound to be lots and lots of contact on almost every play.  If flopping keeps growing at the rate it's growing at, pretty soon we're going to have a game which just involves players flailing all over the court, and it'll start looking more like some crazy dancing craze than an actual basketball game.

So what can the NBA do?  Well it seems as if they already have one idea about how to solve the problem.  Commissioner David Stern met with the NBA's competition committee met last Monday and it seems as if they hammered out some ideas.  The first is a post-game analysis where the league determines if a flop did or did not occur and implements a retroactive penalty (which has not yet been determined but would most likely be a fine or point system) to punish the flop.  Ideally, we'd have referees make the call in-game, but the problem with that is that most flopping takes place at a time and position when the referee does not have a good angle of the flop.  Also, with most flops involving some contact, it is tough in the moment for a referee to successfully determine what's a flop and what's not.  That's why the post-game analysis really seems to be the only reasonable solution.  But then the problem arises of what exactly constitutes a flop.  If you're one of the people asking this question, do yourself a favor and go back to those videos, we'll wait for you to get back .......... Done? Well, that's what a flop is, pretending to have been fouled or pretending to have faced enough contact for a foul to have occurred when in reality only minor or no contact occurred.  Obviously the league may have to put the rule in fancier language, but that should be the gist of it.  So what type of punishment should these guys face?  Fines would only work if they were substantial, so the answer seems to be some kind of point system where a certain number and/or degree of egregiousness of flops leads to a suspension for a couple of games, with possible increased penalties during the playoffs.  Obviously appeals would be made and uproars would be had by players, but in the end it would most likely do a good job at keeping flopping from ruining the game any further.

The game of basketball grew up and continues to grow up on concrete courts like Rucker Park and the Cage in NYC, and the Venice Beach courts in LA, where a fall to the court ends up hurting a little more than it does on a hardwood court.  One of the beauties of basketball is it involves controlled contact, which necessitates a more controlled and subtler use of the body than in sports like football and hockey, where players just try to rip each other's heads off, but still has much more contact than sports like soccer and baseball.  Flopping abuses this great part of the game, the thin line between what's a foul and what's not a foul and it needs to be stamped out before the league needs to start giving out Oscars to the game's best floppers.

You Don't Have to Respect Him ... Just His Play

Sometimes, when it comes to analyzing sports, we can be too critical.  Our hatred for a player or a team clouds our rationality, and we let our emotions get the best of us and get in the way of the truth.  For example, ever since LeBron James moved to Miami, his every move has been overly scrutinized and sometimes unfairly criticized.  That's not to say that he didn't bring it on himself; there was "The Decision" and the welcome party at American Airlines Arena, at which LeBron somewhat kiddingly, yet immodestly set the goal for the number of titles that the Heat trio would win at eight.  Both of these acts, in addition to other factors, made him one of the most reviled athletes in professional sports.  Since then, LeBron has proven flat out that he is the best player in basketball, yet many critics have not conceded this fact.  Critics point to his lack of clutch play, and in a world where we have a 24 hour news cycle, criticisms get repeated, more and more people jump on the critical bandwagon and before you know it, what was formerly opinion, becomes known as fact.  Editorials point to the couple of missed shots at the end of games instead of the amazing '07 performance against Detroit in the 2007 Eastern Conference Finals in Game 5, in which he scored his team's last 25 and 29 of the team's last 30 points, or the fact that he even made it to the '07 Finals with a bunch of nobodies on his team, something that Kobe Bryant has never been able to accomplish, as he has always been surrounded by great players in his runs to the Finals.  We also tend to forget performances like the one from Game 4 of the Eastern Semis of this year in which LeBron scored 40 points, grabbed 18 boards and came one assist shy of a triple double.  Then we conveniently look over the fact that in the playoffs, supposedly non-clutch LeBron has taken 13 final shots to tie or take the lead and made five of them.   Compare that to the stats of a "clutch" player like Kobe, who has taken 27 of the same type of shots and only made 7 of them, and things start to look a little different.  I'm not forgetting that Kobe's won more titles, but he's done so with more talent and support than LeBron has ever had (in case you've forgotten, last year was only the "Big Three's" first year together and guys like Anderson Varejao and Zydrunas Ilgauskas aren't exactly comparable to the Shaquille O'Neals and Pau Gasols of the world).  We forget all of these things because it's easy to forget, because these monster games come all the time from LeBron and we would rather recognize his shortcomings because we hate him, instead of realizing his successes.

There's something LeBron haters need to realize: as much as you don't want to or like to believe it, LeBron James has been playing out of his mind well these playoffs.  He's averaged 30.8 points, 9.6 rebounds, 5.1 assists, shot 50.8% from the field, and in the series against the Celtics played defense against every position from point guard to center.  He passes the ball beautifully, yet makes sure that he saves enough shots for himself, he is a monster on the glass, and his defensive prowess is impeccable.  I get that the Finals still lay ahead and that if LeBron doesn't show up, then most of what he did throughout these playoffs can be rightfully forgotten.  But looking at his stats and overall play during these playoffs so far, it's easy to see he's not getting enough credit, as people hope for his doom in the upcoming Finals rather than realize his success so far.

Hey, if there's one guy that doesn't want LeBron to win a title, it's me.  I thought it was a more-than-cowardly move to go to the Heat instead of seeking out great competition, something that neither Jordan nor Bird nor Magic nor any of the other true greats ever would have done, and something I will never be able to forgive him as a basketball player for.  Still, I never let that hatred cloud my judgment of his game.  The way we view his off-the-court decisions should not affect the way we view his on-the-court decisions.  LeBron has done everything he can to help his team win during these playoffs, and it's about time people really started to take notice, and if he does win the Finals this year, give credit where credit is due.