The Los Angeles Lakers, Long Beach’s unofficial hometown NBA team, opens the playoffs tomorrow without the laughably-named Metta World Peace.

If you follow basketball at all, you know that the thug formerly known as Ron Artest is serving a seven-game suspension of a vicious, malicious, and totally unprovoked elbow to the head of the Oklahoma City Thunder’s James Harden.

Artest (I refuse to refer to this overgrown punk as “Peace”) is no stranger to violence, having served the longest suspension in NBA history for being so out of control as to jump into the stands and attack fans.

Why Artest (along with the other players who followed his lead) wasn’t thrown out of the league I’ll never know (oh wait: could it have something to do with the power of celebrity and the almighty dollar?), but an argument could be made that Artest didn’t start that incident, as a fan precipitated the melee by tossing a drink on him. And since that 2004 brouhaha Artest had done much to rehabilitate his image. Hell, last year he even won the J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award.

Then again, Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize. Image is only skin deep, and Ron Artest is, to judge by his actions, on occasion a violent man, incomprehensibly taking action that on the street could have found him charged of assault with a deadly weapon[1] and certainly can lead to serious injury and even death.

Lakers fans around Long Beach will fly their purple-and-gold banners this weekend from houses and cars, and that’s fine. But I’ve always viewed teams and other organizations not as a location or a uniform, but as the people composing them. And in my eyes people are not essences but the totality of their actions. You’re a good person if you do good, and you’re a good team if you’re composed of good people. Do that math, and the 2012 Lakers are 1/12th irrationally violent, which ought to make any local fan somewhat less enthusiastic about the home team.

I’m guessing most sports fans don’t think like this. San Francisco Giants fans stood by Barry Bonds while the rest of the league’s fans booed him for having cheated the entire sport and history of baseball, right? But let’s imagine that Larry Lakersfan has a son, Jimmy, who plays power forward for Poly. One day Larry’s in the stands for Poly vs. Wilson, and he sees the Bruin center, Ronald, viciously elbow Jimmy in the head. Think Larry’s going to feel a few games off is a fitting punishment for Ronald? I think Larry’s going to want blood — but short of that, I dunno, maybe an ejection from Moore League play?

A severe penalty for a heinous action is probably more likely at the high-school level than the college level, and more likely in college than the pros. We can imagine a university unilaterally suspending a player for attacking fans, while a high-school player who did such a thing could very well see himself expelled from school. Isn’t it a shame that the higher one rises and the more money one makes, the lower the punitive standard to which he is held? Artest is being paid about $7 million this season. Should we really be holding him to a lower standard than we would the teenage center for Woodrow Wilson Classical High School?

And how about geography? What do you think Larry would regard as a proper punishment for LeBron if he elbowed Kobe in exactly the same fashion as Meta World Punk did Harden? I don’t know the exact answer, but I’m sure it ain’t seven games.

To add insult to injury, Artest thinks Lakers fans — along with the rest of the world — are such dupes that we buy his BS about the elbow being unintentional. Look at the video, how he cocks his arm back as far as he can to generate maximum force against Harden’s skull because Harden had the temerity to bump into Artest in the midst of his self-aggrandizement. None of the analysts calling the game had any doubt about Artest’s intentions. It’s an elbow to the head, meant to injure his opponent. That makes Artest not only a thug, but a lying thug[2] — and one who’s hardly sounded sorry in the week since his disgraceful act.

That’s because he’s not. Thus are the Lakers 1/12th despicable. And while it’s fun to root root root for the home team, sometimes when they win it’s a shame.

If the Lakers are bounced out of the playoffs early and the difference is Artest’s absence, a bit of poetic justice will have been written. I know Lakers fans don’t want to hear it, but sometimes our hometown heroes are not the good guys.