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.
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