You kidding me?

Ok, everyone is up in arms talking about the recent hard foul against Rudy Fernandez by Trevor Ariza in the Lakers/Blazers matchup on Monday. The league then announced Tuesday that Ariza would not be suspended, but that Odom would be for leaving the bench in the ensuing "scrum" as the people around the internet like to call it. Now don't get me wrong, basketball just wouldn't be fun to watch if it weren't a contact sport, but still, sometimes you can go too far, that's why we have rules in place. Matt Moore at Hardwood Paroxysm writes an interesting piece about how the Lakers just play reckless, not dirty, just reckless. Normally I'd let that be that.

However, Kurt from Forum Blue and Gold brought up an interesting article in his preview of tonight's Houston game. The article talks about how this kind of play is hard to judge.

"Ariza obviously made contact with Fernandez's head, but he also came reasonably close to getting a block."

Normally I wouldn't have taken exception to something like this, unfortunate accidents like this happen, look at Gerald Wallace's collapsed lung. I mean, no, this is no David West karate chop, which is much worse, despite the fact that Mike Miller was fine whereas both the cases involving the Lakers required hospital attention for the players fouled.

First I want to say, the fact that two of the instances happened to be Lakers doesn't mean I'm trying to find beef with the Lakers, however, if it's a trend it might be something that you want to look at. I'm not going to take an extremist view and say the Lakers play dirty, becuase, honestly, I don't think they do, I think they play effectively, but now am more inclined to agree with Matt Moore that it might be somewhat sloppy, reckless, and therefore dangerous to other players, this could have been anyone else.

Honestly, I think for this thing, I'm on the wagon that Ariza should have been suspended, while there was no "malicious intent" the fact of the matter, it was still a dumb play. I don't care if he's going for the ball, people look at this play and say, "oh he's going for a block, it's all good, just a hard foul" because it doesn't matter if he's trying to get the block through the other player's head? Sure a couple of inches and he might've gotten all ball, a couple inches in the other direction he could've ended Rudy Fernandez's basketball career with a hard swipe across the neck. One commenter noted that because the ball was near Rudy's head it makes it "hard to fault him [Ariza] for making contact with Rudy's head because the head was near the ball which Trevor aimed for." Again... it's ok if he tries to block the ball through Rudy's head?

Kurt mentions:

"I guarantee if Fernandez had done that to Ariza and there was no suspension, at least half this board would have flipped out."

I would've asked for Fernandez to be suspended though. Just because he didn't get one doesn't mean he doesn't deserve one. Think about it.