Metta World Peace was handed down a suspension from the NBA for his elbow to the head of Thunder guard James Harden. He was hit with 7 games which will keep him out of the last game of the regular season, the first round and potentially 2 games in the second round.
World Peace aka Ron Artest expressed remorse when he addressed the media earlier today per ESPN;
“It was bad timing for me and then, physically, it was bad timing for Mr. Harden,” World Peace said after practice was over. “Who can write up a left-hand dunk and then all of the sudden somebody is right behind you? It’s hard to draw that up and to plan something like that. It was just the worst timing for me.”
… I was just way too emotional. It seemed like anger but it was a lot of passion involved. But it was erratic. It was erratic fire, it was erratic passion. It was way too much. Way too much …
“It definitely wasn’t meant to hit him how I hit him. That’s the best way I could describe those sequence of plays and the erratic passion.”
While some take World Peace at his word and believe that the elbow he threw was inadvertent, however, David Stern wasn’t so comforting, he had this to say regarding the suspension that was handed down.
“I believe that it was recklessly thrown and I believe that in looking at the replays again and again that he should have known that James was up against him, and some would argue that he had to have known,”
“It’s really very serious stuff and it does take in account the fact that the perpetrator is who he is and has the record that he has, and this called for in our view a very stiff penalty and we think that seven games, which only includes one regular-season game, is such a stiff penalty.”
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If you ask me, I’m ok with him getting 7 games, that seems fair enough, but the way World Peace is being judged is completely unfair. We can’t continue to pick and choose who we allow to grow and change, and who we deem as evil. Yes he was involved in the worse fight in NBA history, but how long are you going to hold that against him. It’s been 8 years now, to believe he is the same person as he was then is naïve and more points to how you view change in your own life. At some point we have to let people move on from the mistakes they’ve made. If not, we should ban the narrative that America is the land of second chances.
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