NBA Playoffs: Is there a flagrant foul problem?

The first round of the NBA playoffs were marred by flagrant fouls and suspensions. Has this become a greater problem for the league?

For a league that models itself after the athletic virtues of skill and grace rather than violence, the NBA sure is a violent league.

A lot of that violence creates some of the more beautiful basketball, like a Blake Griffin dunk or an Anthony Davis block.

Sometimes it is just violent, like in Game Four of the series between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics.

Early in the game, the Cavs’ Kevin Love and the Celtics’ Kelly Olynyk are fighting for a rebound. Olynyk decides that he is going to use his Gumbyesque limbs to pop Love’s arm out of its socket.

The Cavaliers don’t take too kindly to the injury to their teammate, so they do what anyone would do to get revenge on Kelly Olynyk: they take it out on Jae Crowder.

Both Crowder and Kendrick Perkins drew technical fouls. Crowder was of course not finished being on the receiving end of Cavalier fists.

The cumulative total for games suspended for all three players was three; one for Olynyk and two for Smith.

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One rough play leads to another rough play leads to another rough play. When the dust clears, the Cavaliers are left without two of their starters in Love and Smith, the former of whom will miss the rest of the postseason.

Kevin Love and the rest of the Cavs took issue with the initial play.

From Boston.com:

"“I thought it was a bush league play,” Love said of Olynyk’s foul. “I mean I was out there and Olynyk was in a compromising position and had no chance to get the ball. It’s just too bad he would go to those lengths to take someone out of a game and do it to someone. I have no doubt in my mind he did it on purpose.”“I’ve seen the replay and it didn’t look like a basketball play,” [LeBron] James told reporters. “I’ve seen a lot of tie-ups in my day and that tie-up was a little different. We want to play the game of basketball the right way. You want to be physical but you never want the game to get out of hand where you have injuries. We had two of them tonight and you don’t wish that on nobody.”"

Similarly, in the series between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Chicago Bulls, Mike Dunleavy just decided that he was going to shove Michael Carter-Williams right in the mouth.

In doing so, he incurred the wrath of Giannis.

The NBA punished retaliation harder than the cause, so Giannis Antetokounmpo was given a 1 game suspension from the league while Dunleavy went off without any suspension.

Now, players getting chippy with each other is not a bad thing for the NBA. Players are too often respectful to each other after the end of a game; the hug shared by Tim Duncan and Chris Paul to close out the Spurs-Clippers series was positively disgusting. I vomited in my mouth.

Instead, a healthy disregard for the well being of the opponent should fill partisan fans with glee. Joakim Noah’s vendetta against the city of Cleveland is one of the most noble aspects of the NBA playoffs.

The NBA doesn’t have an attitude problem with its players. It has an enforcement problem. The issue with flagrant fouls is not one of the players themselves but of the referees and the league itself.

Both games were deciding games for the series, and the losing team clearly was going to need to bring up the intensity. What you see with Kelly Olynyk and Kevin Love is Boston clearly gauging how physical they can be in the deciding game. A referee wants to give some leeway in the playoffs, but there has to be limits, and that limit is blatantly attacking the player rather than the ball. Suddenly, Love is severely injured and the Cavs are out looking for revenge. If the Tony Brothers crew deals with the Olynyk foul properly, then it is likely that you don’t see the type of play that colored the rest of the game.

Instead, the Cavs and J.R. Smith retaliated. Smith has missed the first two games, games that the Cavs split with the Bulls but even then that is not enough. The physicality that Smith brought to the table allowed them to eventually win a tight game. Perhaps it wasn’t worth losing him for two games afterword, but perhaps down the road in later rounds it may end up being worth it.

The same could be said for the Mike Dunleavy foul. The league didn’t suspend him at all. He was not even pulled from the game, and it resulted in the Bucks bull rushing him in frustration. Now the Bulls have their secondary wing starter while the Cavs are without theirs.

Why then did the league decide to be lenient on both Smith and Dunleavy?

First, take a look at Smith. To start, Adam Silver likely wants the Cleveland Cavaliers in the NBA Finals. A Cavs-Warriors Finals would draw a ton of viewers, and the series would figure to be drawn out and dramatic. Crippling a team already without Kevin Love will kill the chance of having LeBron James play out his homecoming redemption storyline into the Finals.

Silver also may have been lenient on Smith in order to make up for the loss of Love regardless of their FInals aspirations. He knew that a poor establishment of the rules by the referees allowed for Love to be injured, so he is balancing the injustice with another injustice of a lenient suspension

The reasons for preventing a Mike Dunleavy suspension are less clear. Perhaps the reason why the league wanted to avoid suspending Dunleavy is because they failed to suspend Zaza Pachulia for his overly aggressive play early in the series. In effect, they do a good job of being consistently wrong, and with that one hit begets another hit begets another hit.

Compared to Mike Dunleavy, J.R. Smith just got sent to a gulag. It is not as though Dunleavy doesn’t have a history; earlier this season Dunleavy decked Damian Lillard on a three point shot.

You don’t want the outcomes of playoff games to be decided by the referees, but you also don’t want them to be decided by blatantly illegal basketball. This is one of Silver’s first missteps, and one that he hopefully won’t make again.

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