Well. Blogging's been a little tough lately, the schedule has been a little tight, the holidays are coming and so is a Ravens run through the playoffs. But this fight last Saturday is too good to let go.
* Speaking of the above link: the NBA is fighting very hard to get its footage off of You Tube. It's made a dent, but there's still pages and pages of fan-compiled footage of great old-time NBA melees, and there's already a bunch from this fight. Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago I was looking for the brawl in the 1994 playoffs between the Knicks and Bulls, Derek Harper against the immortal JoJo English, in Chicago, with David Stern looking on in horror a few rows back. I followed a link from a fan website to YouTube, but when I got there, a message popped up and said the video had been removed. Nevertheless, that one is probably in someone's music accompanied remix.
* Anyway ... George Karl's anti-Isiah diatribe is an instant classic. How many times in life will you get a professional coach call a colleague, on camera, in front of dozens of reporters, what Karl called Isiah? If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times, ESPN needs to start a Classic Press Conferences channel, or at least devote a day on ESPN Classic to stuff like this.
* Best call by David Stern: fining each team a half million. There wasn't enough of that after the Pacers-Pistons fight, holding the teams themselves accountable. Worst call: not hitting Isiah at all.
* Some Bad Boy, by the way. Got his feelings hurt because his team wasn't good enough to keep the game close. Who has ever, in life, cried about the other team running up the score in the pros? This isn't Boys Latin against Maryland Little Sisters of the Poor Prep. This is the New York Knickerbockers.
* Carmelo wouldn't make a good Bad Boy. Best comment I've heard so far: after he threw the punch, he started backpedaling like Michael Richards.
* Just out of curiosity, how come I've gotten four times as many emails about Carmelo fighting and getting suspended than I did about him re-opening the Boys and Girls Club in east Baltimore? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.
* From someone who covered the Knicks for the better parts of seven years in the late '80s and early '90s, and watched them closely thereafter: this might have been about the 20th worst fight they've been involved in over the years. Jeff Van Gundy and Alonzo Mourning (the former was hanging onto the latter's leg during a playoff brawl) have to be somewhere laughing at all this hype.
* This, again, on Carmelo - that wasn't a "sucker punch.'' What current ESPN studio host Greg Anthony did to Kevin Johnson in a brawl in Phoenix in 1993 - when Anthony came off the Knicks bench in street clothes, when tempers had cooled, walked up to Johnson while he was being held by a teammate, and punched him, starting a secondary fight - that was a sucker punch. If Mardy Collins didn't know what was coming when Carmelo hit him, he needs his vision checked.
* With the way he acted in escalating that into a real fight, Nate Robinson stands to erase all the feisty-little-guy cred he'd built by winning last year's dunk contest and by literally giving Yao Ming a facial last month. He went from spunky overachiever to sawed-off punk that fast.
* The NBA isn't getting a hit from this way out of proportion, no, not at all. T.O. spits on a guy, and even that's getting buried, but no, the NBA isn't facing a double standard. During last night's game, never was heard a discouraging word about one of the teams, the Bengals, having eight players busted, but you couldn't turn any of the other family of networks for more than 30 seconds before seeing clips of the fight. But nah, the NFL isn't getting Teflon treatment that the NBA would never receive, no sir.
Keep watching this space. There could be more later ...
