You have to take things in context. Stern's trade veto was pure panic. The lockout was ending and the first thing the woe-is-me owners see is a trade that puts the Lakers back in the drivers seat. I don't think he would have messed with the trade if Michael Jordan (an awful executive by the way; does everything as an exec that MJ the player would have despised, and I'm quoting Jeff Van Gundy on that one) and Dan Gilbert (who was still getting post-LeBron sympathy) and even Mark Cuban (who was looking out for number one, not the league) not stepped up and complained loudly. Answering someone else's "why is there so much Laker hate?" question, it's because as fans of another team it gets tiresome switching on ESPN and hearing NBA coverage go like this: Lakers, Heat, Bulls, Magic, Celtics, Knicks, and everybody else?
There is a slight difference in the amount of force used / potential damage caused between the two. Love's stomp was bad but it was not nearly as potentially catastrophic as Artests full-force elbow.
Shade over, draw contact to bait = elbowed. Hopefully Harden learned a valuable lesson. Also, hopefully Ron will learn to stop letting people bait him and control the anti-flop elbow - he could have hurt him way worse.
and the other thing that's telling - even if you attempt to go with Ron's "bad timing" accident BS....how do you ever connect solidly to someone's skull like that with your elbow and not even turn to see who it was you bumped into? His lack of remorse is deafening. He got lucky with the 7 games.
This was way worse than the Malice in the Palace where no one actually got hurt. Harden had a concussion an he's lucky it wasn't worse. There was no reason for Artest to throw a cheap shot either. Artest's elbow was better than Jon Jones elbows in the big MMA fight a few days earlier. vs. I would've been okay if Artest never played in the NBA again and instead they basically said sit out one round of the NBA playoffs. It's a joke.
yeah. ron artest and michael jordan are not comparable in the least except that artest played in chicago before.
Makes me wonder how close he was to snapping on Kobe three years ago in the playoffs. And from what I have seen of Artest, its not that big of a blow. He is not the same defender he once was. He also shot less than 40% this season and shot a horrific three percentage.
