Mike Celizic

I know that Justice is portrayed wearing a blindfold, but there are times when it wouldn’t hurt her to take a peek at the circumstances before issuing a zero-tolerance decision. NBA commissioner David Stern was faced with such an opportunity before suspending Phoenix Suns' Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw. He should have peeked.

I’ve got no problem with slapping a two-game suspension on Robert Horry of the San Antonio Spurs, who threw a forearm that launched Suns point guard Steve Nash into the scorer’s table with 18 seconds left in a game that San Antonio had already lost. The move was as bush-league as it gets, a flagrant attempt to injure the other team’s star player. If Horry had wanted to foul Nash to keep the Spurs’ microscopic hopes alive, all he had to do was throw an arm around him.

Maybe Stern thought that since these are the playoffs, he needed to even up the losses — two games for one player over here; one game each for two players over there. Or maybe he was just leaning on the crutch of his zero-tolerance policy about players not in the game stepping on the court when trouble is brewing.

Either way, he’s wrong. Come to think of it, so is the policy.

Neither Stoudemire nor Diaw were involved in the brief fracas on the court.

Stoudemire particularly did nothing more than step across the line separating the bench area from the court.

If the scuffle had been in front of the Suns’ bench, I’d have no problem with the suspensions. But Nash crashed into the scorer’s table and then onto the floor at the opposite end of the court from where the Suns sit. All the players on the bench knew was that their teammate and team leader crashed, and from where they were sitting, there was no way to know if he was injured or not. When he hit the floor, the table blocked their view.

Say all you want about rules being rules and the players knowing what they are. In a case like that, anyone’s first instinct is to try to see if his teammate is okay. The only way to do that is to stand up and step onto the court to see around the scorer’s table. Neither Stoudemire nor Diaw showed interest in fighting anyone. If they’re guilty of anything, it’s possessing human emotions and instincts.

It didn’t matter to Stern. Stepping on the court is an automatic suspension, and if nothing else he’s been consistent in enforcing it. Time and again, a player crosses the line during an altercation, he’s missing a game.

It makes you glad he’s not a cop. If he were, he’d pull you over for speeding while taking your wife to the hospital to give birth. When you tell him the situation, he’d say, "Sorry, sir, but we don’t tolerate speeders in this town. Have you been drinking?"

Then he’d wait for back-up, make you stand on one leg with your eyes closed while reciting the alphabet backwards starting from "Q", make you blow in the tube when the only thing on your breath is coffee and panic, and finally take his time writing up your ticket. All while your wife is delivering the baby herself.

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This is called zero tolerance, and it’s been a favorite of elected officials for quite some time, going back to the three-strikes-and-you’re-out and Rockefeller-type drug laws. There’s nothing quite like it for showing the voters how serious you are about stopping malefactors in their tracks.

There’s also nothing quite like it for the prison-construction business, as all the people put away by zero-tolerance laws end up having to be housed somewhere for a long, long time.

It hasn’t worked in the real world, and it doesn’t work in sports. You can’t penalize people for having human reactions. You’ve got to look at intent and put your pious zero-tolerance rule where the sun don’t shine.

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Horry, frustrated about losing a game that his team had led for all but the final moments and ticked off at Nash, the man who engineered the victory, did what poor sports and bullies have done from the beginning of time. He tried to hurt the little so-and-so.

The Spurs deserved to be down a man in a series whose winner will be the favorite to win the NBA Championship. But instead of being punished, they got rewarded. Sure, they lost Horry for two, but he’s a back-up who plays about a dozen minutes a game. The Suns, on the other hand, lost their starting center and a substitute who averages about 15 minutes.

So the Suns may have an edge come Game 6, the second game of Horry’s suspension, but Stern all but handed the pivotal Game 5 to the Spurs.

Zero tolerance shouldn’t mean zero brains.