NBA, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER NOW!!!!

• We are now up to at least THREE major fan incidents, involving no fewer than FIVE fans in the 2021 NBA Playoffs, and we're only about halfway through Round One!!!  (They all happened Wednesday night with the fans banned on Thursday.
• The fan who threw popcorn on the Wizards' Russell Westbrook in Philadelphia has been identified, stripped of his season tickets, and banned.
• A Knicks fan spit on Trae Young of the Hawks and has been banned from Madison Square Garden.
• And three Utah Jazz fans have been banned from the Salt Lake City arena after a verbal altercation which appears to have involved Memphis' Ja Morant -- who said, yesterday, it went beyond heckling.

That's FOUR major fan incidents in sports this week (yes, I'm including that debacle at the PGA Championship).

It's time for the NBA and other major sports leagues to get their shit together and understand that there is a subset of the US population which is using the reopening of America with the vaccines as a license to act like abject idiots.

It's rare, really, to even see TWO such incidents.  In a four-day period, we've had FOUR -- including an assault on one injured player, spitting on the opposition's star player, and an incident which may have re-aggravated the knee injury of Brooks Koepka.

The license of the sports fan that Howard Cosell spoke about during his storied life seems to be coming out full-flavor (from his book I Never Played The Game):

"The fan is sacred, even as sports are. He pays the freight, thus he is an entitled being. The media people tell him this every day. Therefore, once within the arena, his emotions whetted by the Sports Syndrome, the fan adopts what John Stewart Mill found to be the classic confusion in the American thought process, the confusion between Liberty and License—a natural and probable consequence of which is fan violence."

This is one of the reasons I damn near went nuclear at that Arena Football League playoff game and the fan interfering in play...

You give these idiots license, or you allow them to TAKE license, and it WILL be on.

You pretty have about 90 days to get this under control and dealt with -- let this seep into football season, and....

Do I even need to tell you?

And if you need a reminder, here's something else I just read:

• The Celtics' Marcus Smart has echoed concerns from Kyrie Irving, who now plays for the Nets, that both heard racist abuse from Boston fans during home games.