Did David Stern Just Ruin Basketball?

Occasionally in a modern media culture of easily disposable headlines and news cycles that are faster than a stage of the Tour de France, the really important stories can be drowned out in the cacophony.

Like, for example, when the commissioner of one of the most popular professional leagues on the face of the Earth indirectly reveals that his entire sport is basically a steaming pile of horse excrement.

(Or, since we're talking about the NBA, I suppose that should be H-O-R-S-E excrement.)

On the table next to my laptop is a torn page from one of last week's editions of The Washington Post. It's a basketball notebook complied from wire services; one that I ripped out of the paper as soon as my jaw retracted from the floor back to its usual home at the base of my skull. The headline on the notebook reads: "Stern Rejects the Mavericks' Protest."

For those of you who may have missed this story, here's the skinny: the Dallas Mavericks protested a game against the Indiana Pacers that was played on Nov. 23. They did so because the official scorer for the game incorrectly counted a two-point basket by Troy Murphy of the Pacers as a three-pointer with nine minutes, 59 seconds left in the second quarter. The Mavericks went on to lose the game, 111-107. Dallas owner Mark Cuban said the officials were alerted to the error. "[The] official scorer said he notified the crew, and no action was taken," Cuban told the Dallas Morning News. "We are protesting that a correctible error was not corrected."

In truth, the team may have also been protesting what was yet another poorly officiated Mavericks game by arch enemy/referee Bennett Salvatore; Coach Avery Johnson was ejected during the contest as well. But the NBA wasn't reviewing any of that — because of the protest, it had to determine whether this error was so egregious that it warranted the replay of this game from the point of the mistake.

Protested games are nothing new in sports, and they've always struck me as pathetically desperate attempts at publicizing discontent with officiating. It would take some blunder of unparalleled magnitude — like an umpire allowing the Dodgers to pinch-hit for the pitcher with a non-roster convicted child molester — for a league official to drop what amounts to a legislative atom bomb and have all or portions of a game replayed.

So not for a moment did I believe Stern or the NBA would agree with Cuban's protest, and they didn't disappoint: They rejected the gripe and kept the game in the Pacers' win column.

But the explanation of that rejection is, in my mind, one of the most underreported, damning, and absolutely stunning miscalculations of David Stern's otherwise illustrious career. It's a comment that undermines his league and a century's worth of basketball in one seemingly harmless clarification.

Stern's reason for rejecting the protest? According to wire reports, it's due to the fact that there were 34 minutes left in the game at the time of the scoring mistake, giving Dallas "substantial opportunity to overcome the one-point error."

In other words, a point stolen in the second quarter isn't as important as a point stolen in, say, the last minute of a game. Because if Murphy's trifecta had been recorded in the final moments of a tight game, there wouldn't have been "substantial opportunity" to correct it; according to this ruling, Cuban and the Mavs might have had a gripe had the mistake been made with, say, less than two minutes to go.

But what Stern has done here is officially devalue the first half — perhaps the first three quarters — of an NBA game. Think about it: any blown call, missed flagrant foul, unjust ejection, or other egregious inequity that occurs in the first half is no longer something you can complain about; suck it up, crybabies, because you've got "substantial opportunity" to get over yourselves.

It's not the first time Stern's NBA has devalued the majority of its games. When the league implemented instant replay, it did so in order for officials to finally get last-second buzzer-beating shots ruled correctly. In most cases, a close call on a 24-second violation earlier in the game would not receive an iota of the scrutiny that a potential game-winning shot did — too much time wasted and momentum broken by watching a TV monitor on the sideline.

It's still two points in the box score, no matter when the basket's scored. But according to David Stern's now-established dogma, two in the second isn't as important as two in the fourth.

It's about "substantial opportunity," after all.

To all of those critics who claim you only need to watch the last five minutes to see an entire NBA game: there's your validation.

So if your team gets jobbed in the first half by the officials, don't bother complaining. Because the first half of an NBA doesn't really matter all that much when there's still "substantial opportunity" to determine a winner.

When does that opportunity become less-than-substantial? Not sure. Obviously, David Stern believes 34 minutes left is a "substantial" amount of basketball in which to overcome an officiating mistake, so there must be a point in the game in which the opportunity to overcome an artificially inflated deficit is no longer "substantial."

I believe it's called "the point of no return." It's also the point at which the commissioner of a professional sports league admits that the majority of his games can be summarily dismissed as filler before the actual "substantial" action occurs.

Greg Wyshynski is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].