Charles Barkley joins growing chorus annoyed with Blake Griffin flopping

After last night’s Memphis loss to the Clippers, I asked a couple Memphis players if the Clippers’ theatrics and flopping bothered them. Nobody would go near the topic. Well, Memphis coach Lionel Hollins called Chris Paul a flopper on national television, but even off the record the Memphis players would shake their heads to acknowledge it and say they didn’t want to talk about it.

But everyone else is.

The Clippers have become the poster children for flopping in the NBA. It lit up twitter Monday night. Blake Griffin gets the brunt of it because it contrasts with his physical, almost confrontational style of play. We have video of Chris Paul flopping when a referee touches him. It’s not a simplistic situation — Griffin and Paul draw a lot of contact in part because they attack the rim. They get fouled more than they get calls. But they are trying to play the gamesmanship card now of selling that contact to get calls with the kind overacting usually reserved for bad dinner theater.

And there may have been no more vocal critic of the way Griffin is handling this than Charles Barkley. He ripped Griffin on the TNT postgame show Monday and said the same thing on the Dan Patrick Show (via Sports Radio Interviews).

“(Griffin) made me so mad last night. I called him Vince Carter last night. Because Vince Carter was a great player — we used to joke he got shot like three times a game. I called him that on the show last night, I said ‘Blake Griffin has turned into a new Vince Carter.’ … He gets shot three or four times a game and just goes down. He better stop that flopping. He gotta stop that, because you can tell all these players are taking cheap shots because he’s getting to be annoying with all the flopping.”

Will he lose the respect of players for flopping?

“No they just gonna enjoy hitting you more. Because what the mentality becomes then is, ‘OK, if you’re gonna flop I’m gonna knock the hell out of you.’ That’s actually the way it goes. They won’t lose respect because he’s a terrific player.”

What the Clippers are doing is not new — even players with a tough reputation like Kobe Bryant sell calls. And that’s part of it — when your team does it, they are just trying to sell the call because the referees don’t respect them; when the other team does it, they are flopping and why doesn’t the referee call that?

What I fear is the second round when the Clippers (assuming they can close out the Grizzlies) take on the Spurs, who have the king of all floppers in Manu Ginobili. It’s going to look at times like there are snipers all over the arena picking guys off. Yea! NBA Basketball, it’s fantastic!