Skip to main content

The most-suspended athletes

Dec 22, 3:41 pm EST

As a kid, Donald Brashear wanted to be a boxer. He didn’t get his wish exactly, but he came pretty close.

Brashear is now a 36-year-old professional hockey player for the Washington Capitals. Officially, he’s a left winger, but he’s just as likely to be called an enforcer. He checks hard and punches harder.

Brashear’s stats reflect his pugnacious playing style. Through Dec. 19, Brashear had earned 2,487 penalty minutes in 957 career NHL games. He’s also on our list of the most suspended athletes in major U.S. team sports over the past dozen years. According to Stats Inc., the winger ranks seventh with six suspensions.

At the top of the list: NBA forward Ron Artest, with 12 suspensions. His most infamous came in the wake of a 2004 rumble between the Indiana Pacers (Artest’s team at the time) and the Detroit Pistons. During the brawl, Artest rushed a fan in the stands and punched another one on the court. The NBA kept Artest off the court for the remaining 73 games of the season.

Another athlete on our list is a fellow alumnus of that notorious Pacer-Pistons fracas. Stephen Jackson, who was Artest’s teammate at the time, received a 30-game disbarment for tussling with fans.

His most recent suspension came at the start of the 2007-2008 season for firing a gun outside a strip club. To Jackson’s credit, he’s balanced some of his disciplinary problems with charitable work. The NBA awarded the forward with its Community Assist Award for March this year.

Three other pro basketball players make the list of most suspended athletes. Power forward Kenyon Martin once compared himself to the Incredible Hulk. “Like they say, you wouldn’t like me when I’m mad,” he told a reporter. He’s accumulated nine suspensions.

Rasheed Wallace, who set a league record for technical fouls in a season, has six. The longest came in 2003 when he was shelved for seven games for threatening an official after a game. Kobe Bryant has five. He received two separate ones in 2007 for elbowing players.

After the NBA, the NHL has the most representatives on the list. Like Donald Brashear, Chris Pronger of the Anaheim Ducks has notched six suspensions. His latest came in March after he stomped on the leg of a Vancouver Canuck player lying on the ice.

The NHL ordered him not to suit up for the next eight games. The leg-stomped Canuck wasn’t injured, but other players haven’t been so lucky. According to ESPN, Pronger was temporarily shut down in 1995 for hitting another player in the throat with a stick and fracturing his thyroid cartilage.

Only one baseball player cracks the top 10: designated hitter Gary Sheffield. He was suspended for four games in September after he charged the mound against the Cleveland Indians and sparked a bench-clearing brawl.

Sheffield, who took some punches in the rumpus, says that some Indians can expect to be personally “penalized” by him. “I don’t care about any league thing – what they do. I’ve got enough money to cover any fine they’ve got. Trust me.”

So keep an eye on Sheffield next season. The slugger is one home run away from a milestone 500 home runs. He could also climb a rung higher on the list of most suspended players.

The top of the list:

1. Ron Artest
2. Kenyon Martin
3. Chris Pronger
4. Andre Roy
5. Stephen Jackson
6. Rasheed Wallace
7. Donald Brashear

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Obesity linked to quantity of sleep!

P eople who sleep fewer than six hours a night - or more than nine - are more likely to be obese, according to a new US study that is one of the largest to show a link between irregular sleep and big bellies. The study also linked light sleepers to higher smoking rates, less physical activity and more alcohol use. The research adds weight to a stream of studies that have found obesity and other health problems in those who don't get proper shuteye, said Dr Ron Kramer, a Colorado physician and a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. "The data is all coming together that short sleepers and long sleepers don't do so well," Kramer said. The study is based on door-to-door surveys of 87,000 US adults from 2004 through 2006 conducted by the National Centre for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Such surveys can't prove cause-effect relationships, so - for example - it's not clear if smoking causes sleeplessn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Women with long nails speak out against iPhone design.

M ost people either love or hate the iPhone's touch screen, and based on a report on the LA Times , women with long fingernails are among the haters. Why? Well, since the iPhone's touchscreen only responds to electrical charges emitted by your bare fingertips, women with long nails are left out in the cold. A woman interviewed for the article went so far as to suggest Apple was being misogynistic because it did not include a stylus for women and didn't consider womens' fingers and nails when designing the phone. Honestly, though, this same argument has come up against keyboards, touch screen monitors, and anything else that involves the use of your fingers, so should every gadget maker change the design of its products to accommodate users with long nails, or should people with long nails learn to work around this problem like they have in the past? I'd love to hear what Apple has to say about all this, but I doubt they'll ev...
Post a Comment
Read more