Jazz players react to Sheed Wallace rule

React excessively after a call by a referee does not go your way, and this season NBA players will immediately be tagged with a technical foul.

The league, it seems, is transforming itself from the National Basketball Association to No Bawling Allowed.

Call it what you want, though.

In these parts, where the Jazz face the Detroit Pistons in a preseason game tonight, there is a different nickname for the crackdown on complaining and demonstrative post-whistle emotion.

Or at least a certain Pistons villain has suggested one.

"It's just another 'Sheed Wallace rule," noted technical-collector Rasheed Wallace told The Detroit News after training camps around the league opened and word of the league's intent to tighten tolerance of the troublemakers spread earlier this month.

By whatever name, Wallace's disdain for the planned policing and other new NBA point-of-emphasis mandates — keep those shirttails tucked in, fellas, and be sure to have all layers of your warmups peeled off before checking in at the scorers' table or you won't be allowed to enter the game — is hardly a lone voice of dissent.

Even normally mild-mannered Minnesota Timberwolves Kevin Garnett has voiced extreme displeasure over the mandate to shut up and tone down gestures like hand-waving and jumping up and down.

"To the fact that you can't really speak to the refs, the refs don't want to hear it," the Associated Press quoted Garnett as saying. "That's almost like communism. That's like Castro."

Predictably, reaction from Utah's boy scouts is much more muted. Still, some with the goody-goody Jazz don't seem sure that legislating reaction so stringently is all good.

"It's an emotional thing when you feel you've been fouled, or you feel a call's gone against your way," said big man Jarron Collins, who isn't exactly a problem child. "They want us to control emotion a little bit — and it's tough to do, sometimes."

"I a little bit disagree with calling emotional stuff," forward Andrei Kirilenko added, "but definitely any kind of disrespect to the referee, any word that is addressed to the referee, I think is wrong."

Kirilenko, regarded as one of the league's most-sportsmanlike players, actually managed to have rescinded the one and only technical foul called against him in the NBA.