Mike Celizic

It’s not hard to assign the blame on what happened in Madison Square Garden Saturday night; there’s so much to go around we’ll still be finding new people to accuse a week from now, including all the usual suspects: society, the media, self-absorbed athletes, people who haven’t been born yet, global warming — it’s a long list.

It was ugly and it’s a stain on the game that isn’t going to wash away quickly. You can say that’s not fair, and I won’t argue with you. Looked at rationally, this is the first brawl the league has had since the big one in Auburn Hills, and that was two years ago.

There have been scads of baseball brawls since then, fights every couple of nights at hockey games across two countries, and who knows how many NFL players taking swings — or kicks — at each other.

So a brawl every two years isn’t really that many, and despite the comparisons you’ll hear, this one between the Nuggets and Knicks, in which all 10 players on the court at the time were ejected, was nothing like the truly disgusting fight between the Pacers and Pistons.

Still any brawls are too many, especially in the NBA, which has been fighting furiously to rid itself of the perception that it’s a haven for thugs, which it isn’t — at least not any more than any other sport. But for most people, perception is reality, and David Stern knows it. That’s why he made everybody dress up in coats and ties last year, to spiff up the league’s image.

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But it’s hard to keep players from letting their emotions get away from them every now and then, especially when playing a sport at top speed and intensity. Even players who should know better — guys like Carmelo Anthony — can sometimes get really, really stupid in the heat of battle.

So these things are going to happen now and then. It’s Stern’s job to see to it that it’s more then than now. That's why he came down so hard on the malefactor’s in Saturday’s brawl that other players will think six or eight times before they even think about throwing a punch.

That's why Melo is sitting 15 games. He delivered the Knicks' Mardy Collins a roundhouse right to the chin, then skittered back to safety. It was the low point of a low night — until after the game.

That was when George Karl got all preachy about how awful it had been. That might have gone over if it hadn’t been that he was the guy who, with fewer than 90 ticks left on the game clock and a 19-point lead, left his starters in the game just to rub a little more salt into the Knicks’ wounds. Karl’s a good friend of Larry Brown’s, you see, and, although he’ll deny it, he might have been thinking about making Isiah Thomas, the Knicks’ coach, president and man who fired Brown, pay for his sins.

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Even if that wasn’t the motivation, leaving the starters in at that stage was unforgivable. (So, too, by the way, was Thomas’ trying to blame Karl’s choice of lineups for his own team’s inability to behave like civilized human beings.) You’re up 20 with 90 seconds to go and the other coach has pulled his starters, you pull yours, too. If you’re really decent, you’ll tell whomever is in the game to lay off the showtime dunks, too; you tell them to show some class.

Karl backfilled like a pro after his little effort at running up the score erupted into a full-court brawl, saying: “I feel bad for the league, I feel bad for the Denver Nuggets and the New York Knicks. ... Very poor display of respecting basketball and respecting the game in the best place in the world to play basketball.”

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Such a pathetic imitation of sincerity shouldn’t go unpunished, although it probably will when Stern gets done sorting this one out and handing out the suspensions — which should be many and lengthy. Karl keeps the NBA’s leading scorer, Anthony, on the court along with other starters in a game that Thomas said the Knicks had already “surrendered.” And when J.R. Smith throws down a flashy slam, then follows it by trying another, Karl seems amazed that the Knick’s would take exception.