Once again, NBA caved in to Cuban

Karl Malone getting suspended for elbowing Steve Nash was a crock.

If the owner of the Dallas Mavericks was anyone other than that incessant lobbyist, Mark Cuban, Malone would be playing today against the Utah Jazz.

But after Cuban's guy, Danny Fortson, got suspended three games for a stupid and lazy foul that put the Suns' Zarko Cabarkapa out for 6-8 weeks, Cuban made such a huge fuss that when a Maverick suddenly became the victim, the league folded.

Instead of doing what was right, Stu Jackson, the NBA's rules enforcer, hit Malone with a one-game suspension for the kind of elbow that happens nightly in the NBA.

Ask any guy who plays in this league. Ask them how many times they've been bopped in the snoot or had to get stitches over an eye after an elbow — inadvertent or otherwise — that went unpunished, both during and after the game.

And Malone's elbow wasn't anything out of the ordinary. The fact was, Nash did a stupid thing by flying into the Laker forward, who had just grabbed a rebound.

Anyone who has played basketball knows that if you're holding the ball and someone wants to go jersey-to-jersey with you, you have a right to clear some space. The unwritten rule is that you play defense at a hair past elbow range, and Nash violated that rule.

Now, I'm not a Malone apologist, as the four regular readers of this column in recent years will attest. So don't think for a minute that this is a fan's defense of a favorite player.

If the league had wanted to hand Malone a fine, OK. A suspension was simply an overreaction to Cuban's overreaction, and if Cuban could be objective for even one minute, he'd realize that it's a bad precedent.

Cuban loves to preach about what's best for the league, but when the smokescreen clears, as it did in this incident, we see that his only interests are his own.

There seems to be a segment of Jazz fans that lost interest in the team when John Stockton and Karl Malone left and have so far not become re-interested.

And that's a shame.

This is an entertaining Jazz team. It's young and sometimes prone to the errors of youth, but it's also fun to watch.

They run, they jump, they hustle and — and this is incredibly rare in today's NBA — they play team ball.