Appropriate penalty? Then what would an appropriate penalty be? 3 games? The same penalty that we suspended Bolden for getting a DUI. Yeah. Makes sense. Tripping players and driving impaired. Deserve the same punishment. Get out of here.
You seem to be missing my point, but okay, fine--let's bring Bolden's DUI into it. It actually helps make my point. He committed an off-court criminal offense, and whatever his team sanctions, he faced the civil penalties that go along with a DUI. Did other players at any point start retaliating
on-court, for what he did? Did the general tenor of play become nastier when he was in the game, because opposing players considered him reckless, or because the appropriate authorities were doing nothing to really punish him? Did players decide to enact their own justice for his DUI, on the court, by playing extra rough against him?
That's what is happening in Allen's case, suggesting that
his actual opponents do not think he was punished enough. They would not be behaving the way they are if they did not think his indefinite-suspension-of-definitely-only-one-game was a sham. It matters not whether you or I think the punishment was sufficient. The point is that
the players don't...and now they are compounding the problem by taking unsportsmanlike actions of their own. The fact that retaliation is
occurring is the only proof I need to say that Allen's penalty was insufficient; if the one-game suspension were enough, then we would not still be seeing sportsmanship issues on the court that are tied back to Allen's behavior.
The problem is not that the suspension wasn't
long enough; the problem is that it was neither
authoritative enough (imposed by the league, to broadcast the idea that blatant unsportsmanlike play will not be tolerated), nor
sincere enough (Coach K: "Whoops! We lost one game...time to lift the suspension of our top scorer..."). So in that context, yes—it was not an appropriate penalty.
(And again: I am not condoning any of the retaliation. If I were the coach of a player who targeted Allen, I'd bench my guy for the remainder of the game and
then give him an indefinite two-game suspension.)
Also risked serious injury to his opponent? The hell are you talking about? There are hard fouls that pose a way bigger risk of injury to an opponent that happen all the time in game. He tripped people, It's not like he undercut someone going for a layup or something.
Apparently, you have never gone down hard on the base of your skull after being tripped. I have...or at least, that's what they told me had happened, later that day. I guess we will just have to disagree about whether or not tripping generates an acceptably low risk of injury. From what's happening on the court, I suspect that many players are not okay with the level of risk that Allen was willing to take with
their knees, ankles and skulls.
Face it, if Allen didn't play for Duke nobody would be making anything of a one game suspension for what he did. But because he does, suddenly tripping someone is a crime against humanity and it's perfectly fine for people to do stuff just as bad, if not worse, than he did.
You're right—if Allen didn't play for Duke, we wouldn't be having this discussion. If it were any other team and any other coach, the league would have sanctioned the player after the second flagrant trip, a year ago—ironically, probably with just the one-game suspension we are currently arguing about...
and it would have been enough, at that point. Most of us would have accepted it as a proper sanction, players would have trusted that the league was looking out for them to ensure fair play, there probably would never have been a third incident, and we wouldn't be seeing additional on-court nastiness. Everyone would have long-since moved on.
But instead the league deferred to the venerated Coach K who, as we've seen, is more concerned about the team's W-L record than about appropriately disciplining a top scorer who repeatedly demonstrated poor sportsmanship on the court—and look where that's gotten us.
...and please, show me anywhere, in this post or one of the previous, where I claimed that what was happening to Allen was perfectly fine. My whole point has been that the retaliation is a
problem, and that it was created by the
perceived laxity of Allen's punishment.
) It's good that they managed to defuse this situation before it could escalate.
