What’s the biggest story in sports right now?

The NHL season kicked off and the hottest team in hockey is the Toronto Maple Leafs – but that’s not it. The MLB post-season is in full flight yet the Yankees-Rangers ALCS game was out-rated by a lame 30-3 blowout MNF matchup between the Jags and the Titans. So that ain’t it either. Golf is in it’s Fall Series, which is for all the also-rans trying to get into the Top 125 for next year so that’s not going to make the grade, (although Rocco Medaite’s win on Sunday was the best story of the weekend). It could be the NFL and its concussion problems and Brett Favre’s “Who Let the Dong Out” controversy, but that’s old news – to me anyway as I’ve written about it the past few weeks.

Nope – weirdly enough I’ve got to say it’s the NBA, which is only in its pre-season mode. The reason I say that is I’ve taken in a few of these exhibitions and boy! watching them has been nothing less than needle-in-the-eye time.

In the offseason the powers that be in roundball got together and decided the biggest issue that needed to be addressed wasn’t the fact that the game’s No.1 star has a Q rating lower than Tiger Woods, or that there is looming labor strife on the horizon, or that there are perpetual loser franchises who seemingly will never have a shot at the playoffs never mind a championship.

Instead – it was the player’s tempers.

Or more specifically, the players getting mad at the refs, who are universally understood to have the toughest officiating job in sports simply because it’s nearly impossible to get any call right.

It’s the nature of the game. Once upon a time, like in 1891 when James Naismith came up with the rules while trying to keep his phys-ed students from getting bored on a rainy afternoon, it was a non-contact sport. Now the players wear full padding under those oversized unis.

It’s a hit or gets hit game now, and a ref could, within the rules, call a foul on every single play. But they don’t. They judge what is foul worthy and the players simply have to take that judgment in stride.

Sometimes, however, they don’t, and beak off at an official. Those days are over for the NBA apparently.

It’s all forced civility all the time from now on.

Uh huh.

Based on some highly dubious market research, the league insists that topping fans wants and needs is stopping NBA players from getting all mad and angry like.

So to address the (non)issue they directed their officials to deal out technicals like Tic Tacs at a Taco eating contest.

Three players were thrown out of Toronto’s first preseason game for getting two technicals each. Complaining about a call, no matter how minimal the demonstration, now results in a foul call.

But wait, there’s more. Fines for technical fouls have doubled – it’s $2,000 now for Nos. 1-5, $3,000 for Nos. 6-10, $4,000 for Nos. 11-15 and $5,000 and a one-game suspension for every other technical starting at No. 16.

As a result, an average of two players has been tossed per game played thus far in the pre-season. Foul calls are up over 100% and the games are taking an extra 15 minutes to play.

The league, in all its wisdom, is slowing the fastest, best two hours in sports for no reason other than they can.

Why is that? What does this fan research really indicate? The league isn’t telling but it’s pretty easy to take a guess.

Given that the league audience is 80% white and the association’s players are 80% black, all that survey says is white folks don’t like to see angry young black men.

The sad truth is that research indicates that the fault isn’t with the players.

It’s with the fans.

Yet the league is trying to appease the fans and their racially driven peccadillos.

What’s left are players like Kevin Garnett, who only gives 100% all the time, getting ejected for smiling at a ref after first getting T’d up for a wave of his arm.

This is, of course, the pre-season and the league could just be trying to rein the players in before it counts. (Seriously, how much you wager that no matter what LeBron James does in his first game out with Miami, he’ll be just fine.)

But that’s hardly the point.

David Stern and the league are seemingly reacting to man’s worst impulses in exactly the opposite way they should.

Time for them to wake up and smell the Obama.

Cheers – Gavin McDougald – AKA Couch