In a 1977 regular season game, Los Angeles Lakers’ Kermit Washington punched the Houston Rockets’ Rudy Tomjanovich in the face so hard that he fractured his skull and tasted spinal fluid leaking into his mouth. He would later need facial reconstruction surgery.
In the 1980s and ’90s, the “Bad Boys” Detroit Pistons, manned by Isiah Thomas, Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman, made their playoff strategy attempting to injure a young Michael Jordan of the Chicago Bulls for four consecutive seasons. Called “The Jordan Rules,” the Pistons’ strategy is infamous for its brutality among Jordan sympathizers, but say what you want about it, it was deeply effective and proved to be a winning game plan. Laimbeer, in particular, is famous for being one of the greatest and meanest enforcers in NBA history — a man as concerned with the repetitive abuse of his opponents as securing rebounds.
To be an enforcer is to toe a very fine line of violence, inflicting the maximum amount of suffering without quashing your team’s chance at winning. You are granted six fouls in a game, which the enforcer views as six opportunities to hurt their opponents and generate so much fear that they immediately fold with their next stare. You are granted two flagrant 1 fouls and one flagrant 2 foul, which leads immediately to an ejection. The task is to make sure that your normal fouls are as effective as possible in interfering with your opponent’s performance without getting yourself ejected, suspended and fined. But even if you do receive those punishments, their reception will only contribute to your aura, in which case it’s completely okay to injure your opponents from time to time.
No player in the modern NBA walks this tightrope better than Draymond Green. While Green is indispensable to the Golden State Warriors, he is, at the core of his being, an enforcer of the first order. Yet his entertaining tendency to randomly hurt opponents, as well as his former teammate Jordan Poole, have been destructive to his team. In the 2016 playoffs, Green received so many flagrant and technical fouls that he was suspended for Game 5 of the 2016 NBA Finals. Green’s absence was a major factor in the Warriors’ loss in Game 5, which let the Cleveland Cavaliers back into the series. The Cavaliers won the next two games, completing a legendary comeback.
Since the 1980s, rates of fouling in the NBA have decreased. And while this is largely a positive change for the sport, it has implications for players like Green. Since the “Malice at the Palace” in 2004, where the Indiana Pacers’ Ron Artest attacked opponents and fans alike, the league instituted structural changes to dissuade players from exhibiting displays of violence toward their opponents. Although these rules are largely followed, the moments where players’ passion and anger take control of their rational sensibilities remain incredibly special to me. Players like Green and the Houston Rockets’ Dillon “The Villain” Brooks understand this fact at a deep level and have maintained the tradition of enforcement. I think there has emerged a healthy proportion of dirty play in the NBA, and there is clearly enough today to continue the sport’s history of physicality and enforcement. Obviously, I hope nobody in the NBA ever needs facial reconstruction surgery again, but I have developed respect for the tradition of enforcement and the important role it plays in the sport’s history. I am happy that the tradition has been contained, preserved and continually practiced.
