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Welcome to your father's NBA

Dress code? What's next, outlawing travelling?

OK, so NBA players can’t wear baseball caps or sunglasses while on the team’s dime anymore. The baggy jeans are gone, and so are the sneakers that bring the big money for the bling-bling.

Wait, cover up the bling-bling, too? Just what is David Stern up to anyway?

Why not bring back the two-handed set shot and short shorts while you’re at it?

Better yet, start calling players for traveling.

Soon this may really be your father’s NBA.

In case you missed it, Stern on Monday did with just one memo what parents across the country have wanted to do every time they saw Allen Iverson sitting on the bench with a retro jersey from another team, a matching hat perched sideways on his head and chains dangling from his neck.

Stern finally declared to the hip-hop culture that helped sell the league that its time has passed: He instituted a dress code.

Nelly, Jay-Z and Usher may own parts of teams, but their players better not be dressing like the music stars.

Among the rules are this: The bling bling (oversized jewelry for those of you who remember the two-handed jumper) can’t be worn on the outside of a shirt. Jeans must be dress jeans. Business casual is the rule of the day.

And this one’s for you, AI. Next time you’re injured and sitting on the bench, you’ll be sitting there with a sport coat on.

“It sends a bad message to kids,” Iverson told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, secure in the knowledge that perhaps only he understood his convoluted logic.

Iverson is right in a way. It does send a message.

It sends it to a corporate America apprehensive of being involved with a league whose players brawl on one kind of court and are often dragged into another. It sends it to parents who might be a put off by Carmelo Anthony appearing in a video where a man warns that people who snitch to police about drug deals “get a hole in their head.”

Even Stern conceded that the reputation of the league’s players is such that it is “not as good as our players are.”

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A dress code isn’t going to change all of that. Players can get in trouble dressed nicely in slacks and a preppy turtleneck almost as easily as they can loaded down with heavy metal around their necks and cockeyed ball caps.

But the style of dress is more than just an affront to the fashion police. It’s a symbol of the whole gangsta scene, one the NBA in the past embraced — or at least tolerated — to win more fans.

It took Stern and his minions awhile, but finally they’re getting the message. That kind of culture may sell $100 sneakers, but it’s one more deterrent to the family of four that already has to shell out a couple hundred dollars to sit in the upper deck of most league arenas to see a game.

The way some players reacted, though, you’d think Stern was trying to take away their Escalades.


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