Miami Heat: Should Chris Andersen Be Suspended for Game 5 Flagrant Foul?

The NBA seems to be very good at retroactively making calls that didn’t get made on the court. Already this series the league has fined players for flopping but did so after the games had concluded and the tape was reviewed. Game 5 presented another incident that the league will be reviewing after Miami Heat center Chris Andersen nearly fought Pacers forward Tyler Hansbrough and was assessed a flagrant foul.

Andersen wasn’t ejected from the game and both he and Hansbrough were given technical fouls for getting into a shoving match, but the question is now being raised as to whether or not Andersen should be given a suspension for what looked like an unprovoked attack on Hansbrough. All accounts of the incident seem to suggest that Andersen was the main aggressor in the situation and his attempt to rile up Hansbrough jives with how the Heat have been playing this postseason.

Remember how the Heat managed to get the Chicago Bulls so worked up that they were spending more time being ejected than they were scoring points? It’s a strategy that isn’t foreign to the NBA and the Heat have been playing mind games with opponents ever since before the arrival of LeBron James and Chris Bosh.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Heat are trying to get the Pacers on an emotional hissy fit while they have them on the brink of elimination. Miami needs just one more game to make it back to the NBA Finals and if they can bump the Pacers down to the emotional peg the Bulls were on, a Game 6 win is almost a given.

But the league may end up suspending Andersen to send a message to the two teams that this isn’t going to be a series they allow to get out of control. That seems like an odd message to send with just two potential games left in the series, but the league isn’t keen on playoff games getting soiled by suspect tactics and this is perhaps the finest series we’ve seen all postseason long.

The Pacers have also been complaining about the Heat playing cheap right out of the gate as Shane Battier’s name has been brought up more than once in regards to cheap shots being given during games. That could also be a something that factors into a suspension of Andersen as he could be the league’s fall guy when it comes to punishing the Heat for the shots they’ve taken all series long.

But if Andersen’s suspended, fans have something to gripe about. A suspension by the NBA means that the foul warranted an ejection, but one was never given. Andersen played a key role in getting the Heat a few steps ahead of the Pacers in Game 5 and had he been ejected, the momentum could have swung the other way.

So there’s really no winning in whatever is decided. The league’s best option is to just not suspend Andersen and fall back on the claim that the series is rough and physical one. Both head coaches are saying as much in their assessment of how things are going, so the league should follow their lead and proceed with the standard duck-and-cover when it comes to making tough calls.