Congressman Stephen Lynch (R-MA), feel free to commiserate with Jeff Van Gundy and Billy Hunter. You’ve just been posterized, rhetorically, by David Stern. From the New York Times’ Dave Curtis and Richard Lenzin Jones :
The most heated exchange occurred after Representative Stephen F. Lynch, Democrat of Massachusetts, asked why the N.B.A., “given the connection between aggressive behavior and steroid use and your policies,” did not test the players on the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers who were involved in a fight with each other and fans in November.
“You don’t know – you don’t test the players,” Lynch said of the N.B.A.’s failure to determine whether steroid use played in role.
Stern (above) told Lynch that just because the league did not know for sure if the players involved had used steroids, that did not mean that they were guilty of taking them.
“And the reality is,” Stern added, “it worries me greatly if the absence of testing for any body – including the members of Congress – would somehow be used to say, ‘Well, if you don’t have it, that’s proof that it must exist,’ and then referring to a policy as pathetic.
“On behalf of the players of the National Basketball Association, I would like to say that the guilt you seek to attribute to them on the basis of this policy is ill-taken and very unfair.”