Lance Stephenson and Michael Beasley Get One-Game Suspensions From BIG3 After Wild Miami Brawl
The BIG3 has handed down its first round of suspensions of the season, and the names will not shock anyone who has watched Lance Stephenson play basketball for the last 15 years.
Stephenson and Michael Beasley were both suspended one game by the league on Sunday for their roles in Saturday’s chaotic game between Miami 305 and LA Riot. The suspensions will be staggered so that Miami can field a full team in their next contest, which is a tidy way of saying that the league still needs both of them on the floor for ratings purposes.
“Competition drives our league. We embrace physical play and welcome trash talk, however, fighting of any kind will not be tolerated,” the league said in a statement.
That is a polite way of describing what actually happened. Beasley got into it with Dwight Howard early in the game and was ejected after a heated exchange. Stephenson then took matters further later in the contest and started throwing punches, which got him tossed and forced Miami to forfeit because they did not have enough players to continue.
This is Stephenson being Stephenson. The reputation goes back to his early NBA days when he was blowing in LeBron James’ ear during a playoff series and turning every regular season game into a sideshow. He is 35 years old now, and the chaos has not slowed down even a little.
Beasley is a different story. He was once a top NBA prospect with first-team All-American hardware from Kansas State. His career never matched the promise, but he kept finding work because the talent was real. Now he is in the BIG3, throwing hands at Dwight Howard, and getting suspended in week one.
That sounds bad. The BIG3 will tell you it is great for business.
This is what the league sells. It is built on retired NBA players, edge cases, and personalities who never quite fit into corporate NBA culture. Stephenson and Beasley are perfect for this product. The fact that Howard, another perfectly cast BIG3 character, was in the middle of the chaos only helps the league market the rest of its season.
The forfeit is the only real consequence here. Miami 305 lost the game and now starts the season at 0-1 because two of their starters could not control themselves. That is a real cost in a short season that determines playoff seeding.
The one-game suspensions are about as light as the league could go without ignoring the incident entirely. Most professional leagues would have handed out multi-game bans for a brawl that ended a game on a forfeit. The BIG3 split it across two games so that neither player has to miss the same contest. That tells you everything about how this league actually views these incidents.
Stephenson and Howard have history. They were involved in a similar incident last year when Howard was ejected during a different BIG3 game. The pattern is becoming routine.
The league wants the entertainment. The players give it to them. Everyone walks away with a story to tell and a small fine that gets paid out of next week’s check. This is exactly the version of the BIG3 that Ice Cube built. The chaos is the point.
Miami 305 still has to figure out how to win games without their best two players for one each. That is a basketball problem. The league solved its real problem the second the punches got thrown, which was making sure people were watching.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
