DeMarcus Cousins Hit With Really Dumb Technical Foul For Hurling Opponent's Shoe Into Crowd

DeMarcus Cousins has received many technical fouls in his career, and the majority of them have been well-earned. This one, from Monday night’s Warriors win over the Hornets, was 100 percent, Grade-A bologna. Cousins, checking Cody Zeller away from the ball and out near the arc, noticed Jeremy Lamb’s shoe just chilling near the free throw line, waiting to nuke someone’s ankle, and chucked the damn thing off into the stands near the sideline:

Immediately he was hit with a technical foul. How dumb! If a player is not allowed to throw an object as large as a shoe off the floor during play, then its presence on the floor during play should trigger an automatic stoppage in play. All of Steph Curry, Draymond Green, Kemba Walker, and Kevin Durant were on the floor just then, to say nothing of Cousins and Lamb and Zeller and a couple other by-God NBA players. How would it be if one of them had rolled an ankle on that damn shoe? That is the very point an extremely displeased Cousins made after the game:

A perfectly sensible rule or guideline would say that if an object is on the floor during live action and the referees don’t stop play, a player can chuck the stupid thing into the damn rafters if it gets it the hell away from the multi-million-dollar ligaments of the league’s best players.