Floppers

Floppers are NBA players that make a habit of faking contact to draw a foul. Is it just a part of the game or poor sportsmanship? Let's keep it simple. It's cowardly. It's bad spotsmanship in the worst way and not the kind of lesson that pro basketball should be teaching our children: that it's ok to bend the rules if it benefits your team. Anyone that says otherwise is a weasel that would also say that nothing is a crime if you get away with it. Any coach that encourages or even just condones flopping is doing a disservice to his players, his team and the league in which he coaches.
Dr. James Naismith invented basketball in Springfield, Mass. in the 1890's to provide physical exercise for students during the cold winter months. He wrote 13 rules. Nowhere in those rules does it say that it is permissable or appropriate for a player to "play act" so as to trick the referees into believing that a foul has taken place when it has not.

Certainly there is a big difference between flopping and "selling" a legitimate call. Shane Battier has a talent for taking a charge and making it look obvious, but it is always a real charge. Karl Malone on the other hand, lived at the foul line because he fell down everytime anyone touched him. I forget who it was that said, "He must have tiny feet."

Now that we have decided that flopping is evil, wicked, mean, bad and nasty, the only question is, how can we go about stopping it? I hear calls for making it a flagrant foul resulting in two free throws and the ball out of bounds. While I sympathize with the severity, it is not appropriate for the offense committed if no one was physically harmed. The correct penalty would be to define it as a technical foul because in reality, flopping is nothing more than showing disrespect to an official, trying to trick him into making a bad call - just as yelling or cursing at him is an attempt to intimidate him into making calls beneficial to one team.

That's it. Flopping is a technical foul. Twice in a game and you're out, just like any other technical. If the league gets behind it and insists the refs call it when they see it, the practice will stop. I'll call David Stern on Monday and get it done.