Forget guns, Stern needs to address gambling

Let’s put aside, for a moment, the fact that Gilbert Arenas’ contract is the only reason anyone ever found out about his brainless decision to bring his unloaded guns to the Verizon Center. This is obvious. As I wrote on Wednesday, if Arenas were leading the league in scoring and not an injury plagued $100 million disaster, this story never leaks.

Now let’s focus on the real issue brought to light by Arenas’ situation: gambling. Oh, guns are a problem too. But they aren’t going anywhere. NBA Commissioner David Stern can ban them from the locker room (he probably assumed his players weren’t foolish enough to be packin’ at the arena already) and he can enforce stricter punishments for those caught in illegal possession of a gun. But he can’t stop players from legally owning any kind of weapon.

Guns are constitutional.

Gambling is cultural. And it’s more popular than ever.

It’s not just taking place among rich athletes on charter planes late at night either. It’s happening at your dining room table, where you think you like the idea of your kids staying in on a Friday night, but you don’t realize that they’re developing a habit that will make you wish they were playing pong instead of poker.

At some point, right around 2003, gambling became the new pickup basketball. I saw it firsthand. I was a junior in high school and you would very rarely find my group of friends hovering around a keg in some open field on a given weekend. Nope, we were hovering around a table in some older guy’s basement trying to make a quick buck. It started with a game called Acey-Deucey --which was probably rigged – and then morphed into various forms of Black Jack and poker until we all settled on no-limit hold ‘em.

We had a regular game for years. Were we addicted? That depends. None of us, at least, none that I know of, were stealing from our friends or families. We weren’t skipping school to play online. We didn’t quit the baseball team. But we definitely played pickup basketball a lot less, we always had a bad beat story to whine about and I think we would all agree that it was easier to find eight guys to play cards than it was for most of us to find a girlfriend.

And over the course of four years, we saw a number of friends exhibit one of the first signs of problem gambling: a bruised ego. That’s what comes long before fists or guns ever enter the equation. But arguments and fights and yes, in Arenas and Javaris Crittenton’s case, even guns can be the end result to a person feeling cheated or angry over losing a little too much.

That’s what people are missing when they’re comparing the NBA to The Wire. Should uneducated, naïve kids from any background, but particularly one that promotes violence, be allowed to own a gun? I say no. But the laws of the land say yes and not even Stern can change that.

What he can do is ban any kind of gambling from anything team-related. No poker or dice on the plane or in the locker room or even in the hotel rooms. He can let that dream of ever having a team play in Las Vegas go(can you imagine what would happen?). And he can make sure that if players don’t follow through, they’ll run the risk of having their contract voided. Believe me, given the currently economic state of the NBA, teams will strictly enforce Stern’s new rule.

And the league and its players will be better for it.

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A sign of things to come for the NBA

David Stern is a lawyer at heart, so he knows how to pick and choose his words carefully. When things are going well, they are historic and record-breaking and when things are looking down, he always delivers an optimistic outlook. Spin is Stern’s best friend, which is why he refuses to call the $200 million loan his league received this week a bailout. It’s the same way Alex Rodriguez refuses to call the stuff he was taking steroids.

But make no mistake about, the cash injection JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America has provided for the NBA isn’t just some budget enhancer; it’s a temporary life preserver for about a dozen franchises. Teams will at least be able to make payroll for the rest of this season, while they attempt to implement more cost-cutting measures for next year.

"It's exactly the opposite" (of a bailout), Stern said yesterday. "This was a show of strength in the creditworthiness of the NBA's teams. It's a great sign of confidence in us.”

No Commissioner, it’s actually a red flag that shows almost half the teams in your league are in danger of going belly up. Give credit to ESPN’s Bill Simmons because he has been all over this mess for two weeks, both on his podcasts and now in a column. The Sports Guy points to the league losing major sponsors, teams practically giving away tickets and the number of dark suites in arenas across the country as signs the NBA is on the verge of a full-fledged crisis.

For the foreseeable future, many franchises are going to focus solely on breaking even, so much so that producing a quality product on the court will become an afterthought. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what you call, Major League Baseball.

Only baseball has the advantage of having the entire season to itself, so even as Americans are staring at a Depression, they still might be willing to take in a ball game this summer in attempt to bring back some form of normalcy to their lives. The NBA isn’t so lucky. It competes head on with the NFL for the first half of its season and then March Madness and baseball are right there during the stretch run.

The average fan barely had the budget for NBA tickets before the recession, so now attending games becomes even less of an option. And when the league can no longer turn to suits to fill the seats and corporations to fill the seats, trouble ensues.

And it’s only going to get worse. What happened this week wasn’t just a bailout for 12 teams.

It was just the first bailout for the NBA.

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David Stern should lift NBA age requirement

Getting an opinion out of LeBron James can sometimes be more difficult than stopping him as he takes off on one of his patented blasts through the lane, but on Friday night, the MVP candidate made one thing clear: He is against the NBA’s minimum-age requirement.

While providing color-commentary for the NBA Rookie Challenge, a game which featured seven one-and-done players and just two who played college basketball for four seasons, James suggested that guys who plan on only being in school for one year are wasting both the university’s and their own time.

“What’s the point if you don’t want to be in school?” James asked.

It certainly won’t help you become an All Star. That much was clear on Sunday night at the official NBA All Star game, which had six Americans who made the jump straight to the league from high school. The top players from the game only strengthen the argument against Commissioner David Stern’s mandatory minimum rule. The leading scorers were Kobe Bryant (27 pts), James (20 pts) and Amare Stoudemire (19 pts) and none of them needed a year off before going pro.

In fact, you could argue that for the best players in the world, college might actually hinder their development. College athletes are only allowed to spend 20 hours a week working on their skills with their head coaches as opposed to the unlimited amount time they could practice in the NBA. There’s also that whole student part of the student-athlete, which forces players to attend class. And while I’m as big a fan of Western Civ as anyone, if your major is basketball, most of your time ought to be spent in the gym.

The lack of talent that surrounds an elite player is another problem. Think about it. These kids spend their entire lives playing in AAU tournaments with the best players in the country, but how many times per season does the top player in college basketball face any type of decent competition? Maybe a handful? A future lottery pick on some college campus is more likely to end up in a picture partying with Michael Phelps than he is to face a challenge on the court.

When it comes down to it, the NBA’s mandatory-minimum age requirement feels more like a punishment to future pros than anything else. And they aren’t that far off. After all, there are very few things that we can absolutely force upon any American. I can think of two: Jail, if they commit a crime, and college basketball, if they want to play in the NBA.

So when James asks what the point is, he’s actually making the best point of all. Going to college is a dream for millions of people all over the world. So is playing in the NBA.

But one shouldn’t have to happen to make the other a reality.

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Random Rumblings: 10/15

• I was at Fenway for game four last night and will have more on that later... Not that there's much to say.
  
  
• He's as good a businessman as any commissioner in professional sports, but that doesn't make David Stern the best human today. With the country facing as bad an economic crisis as it has ever seen, the head of the NBA has decided to cut 9 percent of the league's US Staff, meaning about 80 people will be laid off.
  
  The announcement came Monday, just after wire reports that said the NBA is looking to play regular season games in London leading up to the 2012 Olympics and will partner with the Anschutz Entertainment Group to design around a dozen arenas in China with the first expected to be finished in 2010.
  
  Stern said the league would continue to hire in other countries.
  
  Of course it will. Stern clearly believes, and has for a while now, that the NBA has milked this country for all it is worth and needs to further its international reach in order to maintain basketball's status as the second most popular sport in world. The league will continue to spend millions to promote itself in China every year and even more in an attempt to gain relevance in the UK.
  
  It's a savvy, cost-cutting move to layoff people in this country, the one that has helped the league go mainstream, but Stern is sending a message that will undoubtedly be sent by many businesses in the coming months:
  
  In a recession, the first thing that goes is decency.
  
  
• It's amazing how popular it has become to trash Penn State because its coach is older than me and the four people who read this site combined.
  
  But the main difference between the Nittany Lions and so many other programs this year is the age of the actual players. Joe Paterno's squad seems to put a lot more juniors and seniors on the field than anyone else, and that will make a difference late in the season.
  
  
• Look, nobody wants to forget about the Isiah Thomas era in New York more than I do, but anyone who thinks Chris Duhon is a better point guard than Stephon Marbury is out of their mind.
  
  Let's make this clear: When healthy, and he apparently is, Marbury is the best basketball player the Knicks have.
  
  
• You know who has figured out its place on the internet? WEEI.com. New England's top sports radio station's website realizes that people aren't going there to see scores or updates, so it has hired all kinds of writers to provide excellent daily columns, as opposed to game stories.
  
  
• For some reason, I thought New Haven's Chad Dawson might finally get some respect in the sports world (he already had it in the boxing world) if he could beat a big-name opponent for a title. Well, he absolutely thrashed Antonio Tarver to remain unbeaten, and probably didn't gain a single new fan.
  
  That's how said a state boxing is currently in. When more people care about MMA, a sport that has more one hit wonders than the pop music industry, than they do about a dominate boxer that actually wins the fights he is expected to win, something is clearly wrong.
  
  Too much parity can be a bad thing, just ask the NFL...
  
  
• Maybe it's just because my fantasy football team is winless, but pro football just doesn't seem as fun this year. There seems to be more big-name injuries than in the past which is causing a lot of teams to underachieve.
  
  And I'm sorry, a Tennessee/Tampa Bay Super Bowl doesn't seem too exciting. In fact, the way it looks now, there is only one team that could make the Super Bowl as exciting as it should be:
  
  The Saints, led by Reggie Bush, who looks every bit as good as he was in college.

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The NBA might have a new image problem

Not too long ago, it was the players who were ruining the league. The tattoo having, drug using, fan beating, Hip Hop listening NBA thugs with their crossover dribbles and selfish play were changing the game for the worse. Allen Iverson’s Sports Illustrated cover was considered ‘disgusting.’ The memo was out: Basketball had become too-black for white America.

And whether this was a problem or not, the NBA addressed it as such. In came a dress code along with stiffer fines and suspensions for players who acted out. The officials called more fouls and set out to put an end to the blatant violations that were all too common in this streetball-minded league. The league even stepped it up philanthropically with its NBA Cares initiative - Would a thug really build a house with Habitat for Humanity? This was the NBA’s response to its image problem.

Now it’s the players who should be asking questions and deserve to see action taken, starting with an outside investigation of referees and league officials, both current and former, to see if Tim Donaghy’s recent allegations regarding the altering of playoff games have any validity. And they might. Long before Donaghy ever opened his mouth, the running joke in all sports has been that the leagues would rather see big market teams playing in the most important games. The ratings for a Pistons/Spurs NBA Finals or a Giants/Angels World Series only seemed to back that theory up.

But if Donaghy’s allegations become revelations and the laughing matter becomes fact, serious repercussions need to be taken. People should be fired and David Stern should be pressured to step down.

It all starts with an investigation that better happen soon. Because if it doesn’t, the league will have a whole new image problem. One that you can’t cover up with a dress code.

Tim Donaghy has more credibility than David Stern. – Clubhouse Cancer
The NBA is Fixed? - Tampa Bay Rays and Orlando Magic Blog

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