It shouldn’t have even been a flagrant 1,” Jackson told reporters. “That’s crazy. That’s a vendetta. They have a witch hunt going on. That’s nuts. [Korver's] riding somebody. Everybody does that in this league.

Just as the NFL is deciding it needs to control its players, the NBA is reaching the point where they have cracked the whip too much. Not to parrot Colin Cowherd here, but the perception has always been that the NBA is full of scary criminals and they are tired of that image. They have to sell a mostly black league to a white audience and any violence or “off-court” issues undermine that.

Jeez, it’s not like Kobe has been in trouble recently. He never had any “off-court” issues or, you know, tried to take Mike Miller’s head off (see below).

First the new ball and now this. Pretty soon the NBA is going to be just like soccer, full of floppers who are hoping for an overreaction during a playoff series that results in a suspension or ejection. Hell, they already let Manu Ginobili get away with it.

The larger point is that this “Kobe crackdown” is ridiculous. Punishing him for the Ginobili thing, fine, but when Korver and Marko Jaric both said they thought Bryant’s actions weren’t that severe. Bryant has essentially played the same way for a decade but now the NBA is classifying him as dirty? We’re with Jackson on this one.