Sometimes it's just too easy to present the best of the worst of professional basketball. In this instance, Caron Butler and Dereck Richardson's face did all the work for me. As gags go, you don't get much purer then a guy getting hit in the face with something.

Although, I suppose the ball could've transformed into a pie midair, but that would've just confused people and gotten scientists involved. There are some camps who may have preferred a basketball to the balls. Before weighing in on this debate, I would like to see two similar videos side by side, in which two identical basketball referees get hit with a basketball from identical camera angles—one to the face, the other to the groin.

Unfortunately, I can't provide that. As far as I know, Dereck Richardson has never had a basketball spiked into his sack. In fact, my nearly 4 minutes long, painstakingly thorough search through the internet didn't turn up a single basketball ref taking a similar shot to the family jewels.

So instead, we turn back the clock to October of 2012, and turn our attention overseas to a soccer match between Slovakia and Holland.



That's evidently not the right video. We seem to be experiencing some technical difficulties. The point is, a soccer ref got kicked in the nuts. Not directly—one of the soccer players kicked the ball, & then the ball hit him in the nuts.

His knees buckled a bit, but he didn't go down. It wasn't that good of a video. The camera angle only caught it from behind, which is not the best way to appreciate somebody getting struck in the love spuds.

I can't tell you how funny it would've been if the ball had gravitated towards Richardson's gonads. What I can say, is that the ball hit him in the face, that he collapsed in a heap, and that it was funny. I also know that Greg Anthony accused him of having a glass jaw.