David Stern should resign

That's the conclusion I've reached after watching the Suns give it their all and come up short in Game 5. This series, while not completely over, nonetheless is now heavily tilted in favor of the Spurs. Stern has always been a notoriously heavy handed dictator (see the Joey Crawford incident), but this is probably the most egregious example of injustice in the NBA that I can remember. I've lost pretty much all faith in Stern and his ability to be an honest broker for the players and the league. His actions have seriously undermined fan support in the US and abroad.

The Spurs have been playing an extremely provocative style of NBA basketball, where they couple borderline dirty defensive tactics with a style of play on the offensive end that can best be described as a FlopFest. This Bowen-Ginobili style of play is almost guaranteed to eventually cause a blow-up by an opposing team, one that will be much worse than the mild tickle fight seen in Game 4. A team can only take so much abuse on both ends of the court (with no corresponding corrective actions taken by the league), before that team is going to lose its composure.

This is actually kind of ironic, since it means that Stern is pretty much encouraging and inciting that which his strict interpretation of the rulebook is trying to prevent. This also means that when this future brawl occurs, the team starting the fight will be punished more heavily than the Spurs. Once again rewarding the team using questionable (dirty) tactics. This kind of stuff is once again dragging the NBA down, making it very hard to continue watching games without feeling a mild sense of disgust. After rising out of the cellar in the early 2000s, the league now has a chance to remain a truly great league again. So David Stern, fix it or get out.

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