Pushing and Shoving

San Antonio's Bruce Bowen knees Phoenix's Steve Nash where no man should be kneed. Golden State's Baron Davis clocks Utah's Derek Fisher in the side of the head, for no good reason. Golden State's Jason Richardson flagrantly sends Utah's Mehmet Okur flying to the floor, backside first. San Antonio's Robert Horry hip-checks Nash into a scorer's table, prompting Phoenix's Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw to rush toward the fray.

Hockey? Pro wrestling? Ultimate fighting?

Basketball, actually.

The NBA.

But it's not as bad as it seems, suggests Fisher, who besides working as the Jazz's starting shooting guard and backup point guard moonlights as president of the NBA Players Association.

And it's certainly no worse than it's been in the past, he says.

Rather, Fisher believes, the black eye that to so many looks uglier by the day can be explained away with one word.

Playoffs.

"I think now, because there are so few incidents, when there are incidents it's just completely magnified," said Fisher, whose Jazz have advanced to next week's Western Conference finals after beating Davis and Richardson's Warriors 4-1 in their best-of-seven conference semifinal series. "Not necessarily blown out of proportion, but there is so much more focus on situations when they happen.

"I don't think that it's any more, or less, physical than playoffs in the past," Fisher added. "I don't think guys are — on any team, for that matter — setting out to hurt guys, or injure guys, or just playing the game to be fouling guys in a flagrant matter."

Take the Horry-Nash incident in the ongoing Spurs-Suns series, which resulted in Horry being suspended two games by the league (one for his sending Nash flying, another for striking ex-Jazz guard Raja Bell of the Suns in the aftermath) and Stoudemire and Diaw being suspended one game for leaving Phoenix's bench area.

"Robert's one of the stand-up guys in the league," Fisher said of Horry, one of his former teammates with the Los Angeles Lakers, "so even to think about him and his experience — and then, in just the flash of a moment, for him to make a decision that may ... cost his team — it just shows you how at this time of year people may do things that are out of character or that don't seem fair or are not the right thing."