They ought to just change their slogan to "The NBA: Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't.''

The reaction to the suspensions of Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw for tonight's Game 5 between San Antonio and Phoenix, has been amazing. I have no way of positively identifying whether the same people who are throwing their hands up and shouting to the heavens about how unfair the NBA is to punish two players for only taking a couple of baby steps off the bench and toward where Robert Horry had leveled Steve Nash on Monday night, are the same people who threw their hands up and shouted to the heavens about how the NBA was again harboring criminals, reprobates, deviants and thugs after that slapfight at Madison Square Garden in December.

That's why David Stern held Stoudemire and Diaw to the letter of the law, and that's why the law was put in place in the first place. Well, it was actually put in place because once upon a time, the NBA's larger concern was to prevent, literally, bench-clearing brawls back in the 1990s, which were exemplified by the playoff suspensions with the Knicks and Heat in 1997. They were worried about the league's image, but also about the on-court product.

But since everyone has been treating the NBA like it's finishing school for the Crips and Bloods for the last decade (that's not an exaggeration, as we've learned), and especially since the Auburn Hills brawl three years ago, and since everybody overreacted to the Knicks-Nuggets fight (the first real on-court incident since Auburn Hills), and since the NBA is unashamedly hypersensitive to such perceptions these days, now we have a first-team all-NBA player sitting out a suspension in a pivotal playoff game.

And the Suns players knew the rule. How could any NBA player not know the rule, since their very reputations hang on its implementation? The NBA can't afford to have anything close to a real fight any more. It wouldn't be embraced, applauded or even marketed the way such things are in other sports, or haven't you seen the late-night commercials for the Knockout Hockey DVD set?

Remember a few weeks ago, when the Orioles were praised for "not backing down'' to Gary Sheffield when he menaced Daniel Cabrera in Detroit, how much it signified their feisty nature that they all streamed out of the dugout and the bullpens to back their man up? Yeah, let the NBA's players do that and see how everyone feels about it. In fact, let's see how a scuffle like the one between Jay Payton and Melvin Mora in Toronto the other night would play out if it were, say, Stephen Jackson and Baron Davis, on the bench with cameras trained on it, or in front of the locker room.

Actually, we already know. Hence the rule, and hence the players' full knowledge of it.

Stoudemire and Diaw should have known better. Whatever instincts they had to rush over to Nash, to have his back against a clear cheap shot, must be suppressed, not only because there is a specific rule against it with clear consequences, but because there also is a price to pay to the image of everyone else in the league. Had they not been prohibited from going any further, had they played any role in the scuffle escalating into an actual fight, we would have been right back to the players-as-thugs debate (as if that ever ended).

Yet even as they slammed on the brakes and coaches corralled them before they got to Nash, and even as the NBA did what it had to do to them, you now have the public, and many commentators and talking heads, screaming bloody murder at the league for depriving us of a key player for the home team trying to break a 2-2 series tie, and of that team being punished more than the team that committed the original infraction, and of the star power being diluted, and, of course, the avalanche of conspiracy theories about how the NBA will surely correct the competitive imbalance. (Note the hypocrisy of insisting the league fixes games to favor star players and teams that bring high ratings, then saying the league was wrong for NOT manipulating the outcome to favor a star player and his high-rated team, and then predicting that the league will manipulate the outcome tonight to level the playing field. Of course that all makes sense. All criticism against this league has logic in the critics' eyes.)

So, you have to blame Stoudemire and Diaw for violating a rule that's been on the books for a long time, for which others have always been punished, and that nobody who watches this league can't not be aware of. But blame the double standard that always, and apparently forever, will be applied to the NBA and its players' actions.

This entire incident is really an NBA haters' paradise. Then again, what incident isn't, no matter how benign?