What has happened to the Association? This is ridiculous and this D-Rose foul exemplifies it perfectly. Charmin soft. #Knicks #NBA pic.twitter.com/hsGr3cSjDm
— Elite Sports NY (@EliteSportsNY) December 3, 2016
Squaring off against the young Timberwolves, Derrick Rose of the New York Knicks commits a foul that exemplifies what’s wrong with the NBA.
Are we kidding with this stuff? What happened to the NBA of past years that showcased tough, hard-nosed basketball?
Give me Charles Oakley, Patrick Ewing, Anthony Mason, and John Starks any day. Give me the Association of the 1990s. That’s the NBA I fell in love with.
It’s understandable that any professional sports league would find itself towing the line of cautionary rather than reckless — especially with what the NFL has been dealing with the last decade — but what we routinely see in Adam Silver’s NBA is downright absurd.
Live action is stopped on a nightly basis for officials to review common, harmless fouls. If somebody fouled a guy the way Oakley routinely hammered Michael Jordan two-plus decades ago, Silver would call the feds in via helicopter.
What’s worse is hard fouls aren’t even the only issue. Take Friday night’s matchup between the New York Knicks and Minnesota Timberwolves as a prime example. After a Derrick Rose make, the T-Wolves took to transition. Play was stopped after a D-Rose foul (video above).
Unfortunately, the NBA had to make things complicated. Instead of the officials simply calling a common foul on Rose, they took to the monitors.
Why in the world is the flow of basketball being put to an ice-cold halt for this nonsense?
T-Wolves and former Knick big man Cole Aldrich flopped. While we couldn’t see if their feet were entangled, this was as unvicious as it comes. The closest referee needs to simply make a quick judgment call and play on.
In the end, the call, after all of that monitor time, wasting nearly two minutes of our lives, turned out to be a common foul.
But that’s a pipe dream. This issue has only gotten worse each season the last decade and will continue to put a stop to basketball over time.
Attention Adam Silver: either make the NBA a non-contact sport and put ’em all in red jerseys or let ’em play a little bit. We, as fans, can’t take it anymore.
