In this week's podcast (which should be posted this morning), Milton Kent, Joe Burris and I talked about the Pacman Jones situation from two weeks ago at NBA All-Star Weekend - where the Titans defensive back might be connected to shootings at a Vegas strip club that left three injured, including one paralyzed.

A couple of updates on it (besides the one link above, in which the strip club owner essentially claims that Jones actually took money for himself that was thrown on-stage at the dancers):

Jones is being represented by the same Atlanta law firm that represented both Ray Lewis in 2000 and Jamal Lewis in 2004. Good choice, you'd think, since both avoided serious jail time.

Also - as was suggested in the podcast - the NBA is somehow getting some of the blame for the whole mess, just because it happened during its marquee event. It's not as if no one saw that coming; it's par for the course in the NBA, where the worst is always assumed no matter how distant the connection is. By comparison, Tupac Shakur was shot to death in Vegas after a Mike Tyson fight 10 years ago, yet never a word was uttered that it was the fault of Tyson, the promoters or the sport of boxing for holding the fight there. And there are few more unsavory blends than Tyson, boxing and Vegas.

Yet apparently, the NBA's reputation is worse than all three combined. Evidence of that: in at least two previous All-Star sites - Philadelphia in 2002, Denver 2005 - local residents and many of the media reacted to the arrival by saying, essentially, "Lock the doors, hide the women and children, put the cops on overtime, here they come.'' Never heard such pronouncements when the Super Bowl has shown up, not even last month in Miami.

This comes up here because on ESPN Radio's (and TV's) Mike and Mike in the Morning show today (still airing for another hour, then available on the website), they pointed out how many people are saying, "The NBA should have known better than to hold its All-Star Game in Vegas'' - implying that such a combination made a violent crime a foregone conclusion. They vehemently disagreed, and invited callers and emailers to explain why this thought is going around.

Which brings us back to one of the points in the podcast - this is only the latest crime connected to the NFL, and it's now, finally, becoming a serious threat to the league's image, so much that the commissioner, players and union are trying to figure out how to fix it, yet its image is still pristine compared to the NBA's.

Large segments of the public are blaming a crime that's entangling an NFL player who's had multiple previous scrapes with the law, and only the latest in a long string of players getting into legal trouble for well over a year, on the NBA, which did nothing more than show up in town.

Why?

(UPDATE: Utah Jazz and former Laker and Warrior guard Derek Fisher, recently named president of the NBA players association, asks the same question.)

And we won't even get into the gleeful reporting, the lack of outrage and the absence of serious discipline in the massive brawl and subsequent retaliation in the NHL last week. It's a little harder to stir up a conversation about that than it was about that Knicks-Nuggets slapfest in December, have you noticed?