Joakim Noah’s No Kobe Bryant

Wait -- but there's a general disparity between how a player can treat a referee and a fan. As long as they're not on camera, a player can say pretty much anything to the dude in the front row, but there is a level of accountability built into the player-referee relationship, and a corresponding standard for behavior. Remember that Rasheed Wallace was (rightfully) thrown out of a game for staring at a referee.

It seems to follow that the fines in this instance would be different. I have a feeling -- and I could be wrong -- that the league would have fined Kobe if he had used a less hateful curse in place of the f word. There's just a different standard for behavior.

Please don't get me wrong, I am a big ally of LBGT rights, and I have disscussed this issue at length at my blog, hoopsididitagain.wordpress.com -- it just seems you guys are overlooking an obvious distinction to me.

The disparity between the two fines is not rational at all. Obviously this is true from a human, social perspective: the purpose is to prevent players from using slurs that are highly offensive to many people, including other players, team staff, and employees of the league. But it's also true from a business perspective: that the NBA is doing little more than protecting its image — as opposed to penalizing the use of an offensive slur — is plainly evident to anyone who pays attention. And when it becomes obvious that an organization is only "doing the right thing" because it's good for business, and not because it's the right thing to do, then it can quickly become bad for business. The right thing to do is to issue the same fine every time the slur is said, no matter who says it or to whom they say it. Not only will the PR ultimately be more positive — the league will be seen as consistently strong in its stand against this kind of thing — but it will be more effective in preventing future use of the word as well as the negative coverage that would come with it.

Also, these things don't happen in a vacuum, they happen in relation to one another, and I would argue that Noah's use of the slur has resulted in more coverage than Kobe's did, simply for the fact that Kobe's already happened. And if some benchwarmer whose team didn't even make the playoffs uttered it tomorrow on national television, the coverage would be amplified even more, way beyond what it was when only Kobe had said it. The narrative is changing from "Kobe said this" to "the league has a problem," and every single time it happens now, it will contribute to this narrative and further harm the league's image.

"says to me that I as a fan am not the most important person in the building at all and that is a problem"

You as a fan aren't the most important person in the arena. There are tens of thousands of other fans in the building and thirty or fewer basketball players. Moreover, nobody came there to see you unless you brought them with you. If this is a problem then yes, you should go spend your money on someone willing to indulge your sense of self importance instead of spending it to watch sports- you won’t get a high return on your dollar that way. The entire system is setup to revel in the gifts of people that are not you.

That said, the most defensible justification for the difference in severity between Kobe's fine and Noah's is that Noah was intentional provoked by a fan. The ref was doing his job and Kobe didn’t like it, so he insulted him. From player accounts, the fan in question was laying into Noah in a prolonged and demeaning manner. That doesn’t excuse an action, but it is a mitigating circumstance.

Another mitigating circumstance can (and should) be the reaction of the player to what they did. Noah has repeatedly and sincerely apologized, as well as owning up to the wrongness of his reaction to the fan. Kobe wanted to brush the whole thing under the rug.

Finally, there’s the comparison between the fine and the players’ respective salaries to look at. Kobe made over 24 million (almost 25) and was fined 100k, or about .4% of his salary. Noah made just over 3 million and was fined 50k, or 1.6% of his salary. Noah’s penalty was a larger chunk of his pay than Kobe’s.

Kobe might be more famous than Noah, but the Conference Finals is a higher exposure venue than a regular season game. Any repeat offense was also going to receive increased attention following Kobe’s incident. Choosing the “exposure level” ground to make your justification stand seems like a poor choice given the alternatives.

A couple other things to consider...

1. Kobe makes roughly 8x what Noah makes in a season. To the extent that fines should have somewhat of a proportional impact on a player financially, Kobe's 2x fine makes some sense purely from that standpoint.

2. The official was doing his job, presumably to the best of his ability. The fan who was jawing at Noah was intentionally baiting him. So, one could reasonably argue that Kobe's reaction to a guy trying to do his job is worse than Noah's reaction to a guy who was trying to get a rise out of him--and if you're to believe Noah, the fan was being a real jerk.

You sir, clearly, don't have a clue. I don't even have to ask if you've played basketball at a high level.

As a fan I take most insult from the fact that insult against the referee got the higher fine, I don't care about the fact that the subjects get different degrees of attention. The difference in fees, where the violations only difference was the target of the slur, says to me that I as a fan am not the most important person in the building at all and that is a problem, so maybe we as fans need to use our money in more important ways, maybe we need to turn the channel to watch more important shows