With his team trailing by 19 points, Thomas felt any attempt by Anthony to score again would be designed to embarrass his team and thereby grounds for reprisals. According to the unwritten rules of the NBA, a player of Anthony's stature shouldn't have been in the match at that point in a blow-out so he represented a legitimate target.

Seconds later, Nuggets' guard JR Smith's drive towards a lay-up was brutally interrupted by the Knicks' Mardy Collins with a flagrant foul. Then, all hell broke loose.

What started out as obligatory macho posturing soon degenerated into full-on fisticuffs which spilled over into the nearby seats and involved a couple of dozen players and team officials. An exclamation point was put on the debacle when Anthony blindsided Collins with a haymaker that buckled his knees.

After order had finally been restored, all 10 players on court at the time of the tackle were ejected and the controversy was only beginning.

It says much for their season of mediocrity that the dismissed Knicks' players received some of the biggest cheers of their campaign as they trooped down the tunnel.

Their fans were apparently pleased this moribund bunch finally evinced signs of life.

The NBA were less happy about the spectacle. In an efficient manner that is a lesson to every other professional sport, commissioner David Stern ensured those involved were immediately subjected to the full rigours of the disciplinary process. By Monday lunchtime, both clubs were fined $500,000 and amid a flurry of suspensions, Anthony received the heaviest punishment of all.

The then top scorer in the league fully deserved his 15game ban. Once his cheap shot landed on Collins' jaw, he turned and ran in the sort of cowardly move that has drawn criticism from throughout the sport. One of three young stars dubbed the future of the NBA by Stern - Cleveland Cavaliers' Lebron James and Miami Heat's Dwayne Wade are the others - he's previously got into trouble for starring in a Baltimore gang video. In that televised cameo, he urged kids in the 'hood not to co-operate with any police investigations into local crime, or, in his parlance, to "Stop snitchin". Common sense is obviously not one of the gifts for which the Nuggets pay him $16m per year.

"In other sports, there are incidents that are way worse than basketball, " said Knicks' guard Steve Francis who missed the fight due to injury.

"So many worse things happen every game or four or five times a year, but because there are more black players in the NBA, it's under the microscope more than baseball or hockey."

Francis' lame attempt to play the race card came to naught because the reason the NBA fights are more of a big deal is a simple one.

This is a league so obsessed with its public image that last season it introduced a strict dress code, requiring players to wear business attire to games. Not to mention that following the incident in which Ron Artest ended up fighting in the stands during an encounter between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers two years ago, Stern had warned clubs he'd come down especially hard on fighting.

"It is a message that I am going to start holding our teams accountable for the actions of their players and other employees, " said Stern of the penalties imposed last Monday. "What I'm saying is if you continue to employ employees who engage in these actions, your organisation is going to have to pay a price even beyond the suspensions. We believe that the heat of the moment allows certain overstepping of traditional bounds. We understand that we've got some original characters among our coaching staff and we allow a one-time outburst.

But over time we have to realise that a lot of people are watching us, many of them young."

Ironically, Stern himself was lambasted by some for failing to discipline Thomas for his perceived role in instigating the row. The exact input of the Knicks' coach was forensically examined by pundits as speculation abounded that his Nuggets' counterpart George Karl had indeed been deliberating trying to run up the score as a measure of revenge. Last summer, Thomas shafted Larry Brown, the then New York coach and one of Karl's best friends. Whether or not last Saturday night was payback, it certainly spawned an impressive bout of name-calling.

"In my mind it was premeditated, it was directed by Isiah, " said Karl in a rant to television reporters. "He made a bad situation worse.

He's a jerk, for what he's trying to do. I mean, I have a basketball team that's learning to win, and learning to win on the road, and my team has blown 10-point leads, 11-point leads with two minutes to go, and I watched Utah blow a 12-point lead to Sacramento two nights before with four minutes to go in the game, and you're telling me that I'm running the score up? He should be held accountable for what his actions are. He's full of shit. He's a total asshole."

That an expletive-laden rant marked the final act of the entire farce was kind of appropriate.