Why David Stern Should Be Thanking Metta World Peace

In a season dominated by flopping, whining, waffling and tanking, NBA fans can ironically thank a man named Metta World Peace for returning sanity to professional basketball.

Ron Artest’s elbow on James Harden in Sunday’s Lakers-Thunder game earned the NBA’s premier problem child a seven-game suspension and has been treated by most NBA pundits as somewhere between armed robbery and nuclear assault.

As we watch the Artest elbow over and over again in HD slow motion, the voices droning in the background beat into our heads that this is more proof that increased violence is killing professional sports.

The Artest elbow is somehow the culmination of the Saints’ bounty scandal, fighting in hockey and years’ worth of team doctors ignoring head injuries.

First off, the idea that sports are somehow more violent now than they were in past decades is absurd.

Kermit Washington’s punch, Nolan Ryan on Robin Ventura, chop blocks in the NFL—those things didn’t happen in Russia.

Thanks to rule changes, stiffer penalties and cameras catching every tiny infraction, sports today are far less violent than any other time in history.   

On the flip side, all our other forms of entertainment are ratcheting up the level of violence, so let’s dial back the righteous ignition over what’s happening on the court/field.

The same guy who is up in arms over Artest’s elbow turns off the game to watch Game of Thrones, while his daughter reads the Hunger Games and his wife is on her third best seller about sadomasochism.

For the NBA in particular, the specter of increased violence pales in comparison to the true threat to the league’s well-being—apathy.

We’re finishing up a year in which a quarter of NBA teams called it quits with three weeks remaining.

The league’s best center submarined his franchise by whining his way through the entire season.

The alleged heir to Jordan’s throne disappears in the clutch and doesn’t even care enough to shave his homeless beard.

With so many stars so actively aware that their every move might impact their global marketability, Artest’s competitive psychosis is frankly refreshing.

It’s nice to see a guy who is so caught up in the heat of battle that he momentarily becomes mentally unhinged.

The only time you’ll find Dwight Howard that mad is when he’s complaining to a ref.

It’s not politically correct to say, but the threat of violence makes the NBA game more compelling and represents an edge that the league sorely needs to get back.

Tell me you don’t want to watch a game in which the genuine hatred between opposing players is boiling so close to the surface that it could erupt at any point into an actual brawl.

That’s what the NBA used to have with rivalries like the Bulls-Pistons and Pacers-Knicks.

Now tell me you don’t want to watch a Lakers-Thunder playoff series 10,000 times more now that Artest has jarred some life into the rivalry.

David Stern can wax poetic in public all he wants about Artest as a repeat offender and the need to curb such violence in today’s NBA.

When the cameras go off, Stern should place a private call to Metta and thank him for reminding us all what makes the NBA interesting.