It was close to an admission that the no-flopping rule was a flop.
Outgoing NBA commissioner David Stern on Tuesday in his pre-NBA Finals news conference that the league's first effort at curbing flops - in which a defensive player allows an offensive player to bump him and then exaggerate the force of the contact by falling to the ground - was not harsh enough to make them go away.
"It isn't enough. It isn't enough," Stern said, according to NBCSports.com. "You're not going to cause somebody to stop it for $5,000 when the average player's salary is 5.5 million. And anyone who thought that was going to happen was allowing hope to prevail over reason. But you take a step and you begin to see it."
Stern said he believed the league would get stricter with the rule during the 2013-14 season but was noncommittal as to what additional penalties might be involved.
"Yes, I think we do," Stern said. "I think we have the data. I don't know if we have the stomach. And we'll have to see what happens with the Competition Committee and the Board."
He wanted to make clear that the current rules in place about flopping were just a test to determine how players would react, rather than using the rule as a permanent solution.
"We knew that flopping was going to be far from perfect," Stern said. "And we gather more attention because we were giving it more attention. But the point was to do it gently, look at all the flops, and there have been plenty, penalize the most egregious very gently. We could end that immediately if we decided to suspend players, but that might be a little bit draconian at the moment. And so it's going to be up to the Board and the Competition Committee to decide how much they want to do."
The follow-up question as to the reasoning behind starting "gently" never came, nor was Stern asked why officials weren't told to call a foul on the flopper or simply ignore the action, which would give the offensive player the advantage.
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