Dwayne Wade Wants NBA To Protect Players Better After Receiving Fine
Dwayne Wade was fined $15,000 by the NBA this week for making an obscene gesture at a Charlotte Hornets fan at the end of the third quarter on Wednesday night.
Wade was assumedly frustrated after the Heat had a few bad possessions to end the quarter, some fans got the best of him with some comments, and Wade gave them the middle finger as he came off the court.
This wasn’t the “Malace at the Palace” or anything, but the league took it seriously enough to issue a fine, which comes across somewhat as protecting the fans from being explicitly taunted by players. Wade is of the mindset that the NBA needs to do a better of job of protecting the players instead.
Via Tim Reynolds of the Associated Press:
Wade has asked the NBA to further improve the ways it protects players from the most unruly of fans, making that request during the league’s brief investigation
of his incident with the crowd in Charlotte on Wednesday night.
“The NBA is an unbelievable league, and I’m one of the first ones to be doing NBA Cares and all these things in the community, but they need to protect us a little more,” Wade told The Associated Press. “They need to do a better job of protecting players in the arena. It’s open game on us. We’re big boys, we can take it, but everyone has their breaking point.” …
Wade said a number of fans were saying things about his wife, actress Gabrielle Union, and that the comments got progressively worse as the night went along. He lost his cool, approaching the group with the middle finger raised on one of his hands.
This is rough. In the end, the only solution is for players to keep on taking it. Fans are natural hecklers. Some way more so than others. We know that Wade, Carmelo, Durant, LeBron and other stars deal with this constantly. Unfortunately it’s pretty difficult to think of a reasonable strategy to “protect” players from these kinds of fans. They’re consumers of the the brand, and while the customer may not always be right, in this case, they’ll almost always come first.
