Flying Explosives Mar Greek Finals

So the two preeminent Greek basketball clubs, Olympiakos and Panathinaikos, got together for the opener of the best-of-five league finals in Athens. Visiting Panathinaikos took a 60-58 lead with two minutes left. The Olympiakos fans reacted, um, poorly. Here's video of the incident from Ball in Europe. (And yes, that's a lit flare thrown at the Panathinkaikos bench.)




Obviously, this is quite scary. TrueHoop notes that Josh Childress (who plays for the home team, mind you) said after the Olympiakos loss that riots like this will have him strongly considering returning to the NBA next season. For all the adoration we romantics heap on the unbelievable spirit shown by European club fans, there is a line. And European fans (particularly, it seems, in Greece and Turkey) cross it too often.

One thing I can't quite wrap my head around here: check out all that riot police at the end of the video. The court is well defended by foot, with the flying explosives (!) posing the biggest danger. Where are all these police when the fans enter the arena? It seems like the arenas could do a much, much better job preventing this activity by preventing people from bringing flares into the arena. Because again, the riot police keep the fans off the court. They can't erect a force field to prevent flying objects, though.

For all the attention The Brawl sit gets, a flying beer precipitated that incident. Imagine if an explosive had hit Ron Artest in the chest. How many consecutive times would Mitch Albom's head have spontaneously combusted in that case?