The Long-term fall-out from the Isaiah Stewart-LeBron James Kerfuffle. And no, it wasn't Malice at The Palace 2.0!
The LeBron James-Isaiah Stewart incident highlights the potential problems of a faster-paced game with fewer whistles. It's now more likely than ever that cooler heads won't prevail in heated moments.
Most of you have either seen, heard about or spent time last night/this morning gossiping about the most memorable box-out LeBron James has ever been part of.
Images of Detroit Pistons big man Isaiah Stewart, his face bloodied after an inadvertent blow to the face from James, won’t be forgotten anytime soon.
And while the NBA will likely add on to the ejection that both James and Stewart received for their roles in the incident and the moments afterwards, that’s not what this is about.
The NBA as a league is just as much responsible for what happened, as any one individual.
In an effort to quicken the game’s pace, referees in this still-young regular season are calling these games like they are Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
The result has been games ending closer to two hours than the usual two hours and 30 minutes.
But by quickening up the pace, the league is also allowing the quickening of tempers to rise and go unchecked.
And that is bound to result in not only more physical play, but an increasing likelihood that players will look to retaliate.
We’re about a month into the NBA season, and we’ve already seen league MVP Nikola Jokic of Denver get into it with Markieff Morris of the Miami Heat. Just a few days later, Utah’s Rudy Gobert and Indiana’s Myles Turner got into a tussle.
And the James-Stewart kerfuffle has harkened talking pundits to compare it to the Malice at The Palace on November 9, 2004.
The reason why I can remember that date without hesitation is because I was there on press row (white shirt, 2:23 mark) as a beat writer for mlive.com covering the Pistons.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that what we saw between James and Stewart was nothing remotely close to hell breaking loose 17-plus years ago.
But the fall-out from that 2004 incident was an increased emphasis on limiting rough play, a legit concern today. Officials have to not only hold players accountable to the rules of play but also be on guard if tempers start to rise to the point where players deliver more than hard fouls to one another.
At the time of the James-Stewart incident, the Lakers were facing a double-digit deficit in the third quarter after having lost three straight and four of their previous five to dip below .500 record-wise.
LeBron was having a decent game stat-wise, with 10 points on 4-for-7 shooting to go with five assists as the Lakers rallied to get the win in his absence. His impact on the scoreboard was non-existent for the time he played, especially when you consider his plus/minus was a woeful minus-15 which was worse than any other Lakers player.
Stewart wasn’t scoring much (he had just four points at the time of his ejection), but the 6-foot-8, 250-pound center was impactable in other ways. Among them was a net rating of plus-7.9. And his defense this season has been strong, evident by opponents shooting just 41.2 percent from the field when he’s defending them.
Many of the league’s bruisers are seeing a slight increase in their defensive ratings, in part because officials are giving them more leeway to be physical as a means of speeding up the game.
You won’t find many complaining about an NBA game that ends closer to two hours than not.
But at what cost?