Ron Artest

[Sal Giaco]

I think a few people are missing the boat here. I'll try to sum it up this way...

1. Ben Wallace should have never shoved Artest
2. The fan should have never thrown a cup of beer at Artest
3. The fans behaved like the typical drunken idiots that they are

You can blame the whole altercation on the Pistons and their fans and you're probably 100% right but guess what...... that still does NOT justify Artest and his teamates going into the stands and taking matters into their own hands.

Indiana fans can blame everything on everyone else but the bottom line is the NBA dropped the axe on Artest, O'Neal and Jackson - that's atleast 50% of their scoring that will disappear for most of the regular season. Now you tell me who the idiots are....?

One other note - Why was Artest laying down on the scorer's table anyway? Doing a dumb thing like this make's you a prime taget fan abuse. Does that mean he deserved to get a beer thrown at him? Absolutely NOT. However, when you do stupids things like that you put yourself in bad situations. I think there were plenty of areas he could have went to other than where he went. Again, I'm not justifying a fan throwing an object at him but his smart a$$ personality led him to once again, make some bad choices.

[Edited by Sal Giaco on Nov 21st, 2004 at 06:20 PM]