nnDid Bobcat junior partner Nelly cause Vegas strippers to riot by “raining” cash down on them? No one seems to know what happened at the Minxx club that night, other than the mayhem led to three people being shot. Then again, the NBA All-Star game brought so much mayhem to Sin City that the city is just now pulling itself together.

Columnist Jason Whitlock says what needs to be said:

An event planned to showcase what is right about professional basketball has been turned into a 72-hour display of why commissioner David Stern can’t sleep at night and spends his days thinking of rules to mask what the NBA has come to represent.

Good luck fixing All-Star Weekend.

The game is a sloppy, boring, half-hearted mess. The dunk contest is contrived and pointless. The celebrity contest is unintended comedy. And, worst of all, All-Star Weekend revelers have transformed the league’s midseason exhibition into the new millennium Freaknik, an out-of-control street party that features gunplay, violence, non-stop weed smoke and general mayhem.

Word of all the criminal activity that transpired during All-Star Weekend has been slowly leaking out on Las Vegas radio shows and TV newscasts and on Internet blogs the past 24 hours.

“It was filled with an element of violence,” Teresa Frey, general manager for Coco’s restaurant, told klastv.com. “They don’t want to pay their bills. They don’t want to respect us or each other.”

Things got so bad that she closed the 24-hour restaurant from 2 a.m. to 4 a.m.

“I have been spit on. I have had food thrown at me,” she said. “I have lost two servers out of fear. I have locked my door out of the fear of violence.”

All weekend, people, especially cab drivers, gossiped about brawls and shootings. You didn’t know what to believe because the local newspaper was filled with stories about what a raging success All-Star Weekend was. The city is desperately trying to attract an NBA franchise, and, I guess, there was no reason to let a few bloody bodies get in the way of a cozy relationship with Stern.

That last bit sound familiar? Stern absolutely demands fawning press coverage, and with all of Stern’s former sidemen now running the Bobcats, so do they. That is why NBA beat writer Rick Bonnell must resort to reporting on what Michael Jordan wrote in a letter to season ticket holders while The New York Times gets to interview Jordan and the Big Cat, Bob Johnson.

Meanwhile, the local franchise and the league as a whole spirals out of control. (Note, the on-court effort has been pretty good of late. Attendance, not so much.) Now we have a Bobcat partner involved, so witnesses claim, in a nasty little dust up that does not exactly reflect the “high character” Johnson promised Charlotte.

More from Whitlock:

David Stern seriously needs to consider moving the event out of the country for the next couple of years in hopes that young, hip-hop hoodlums would find another event to terrorize. Taking the game to Canada won’t do it. The game needs to be moved overseas, someplace where the Bloods and Crips and hookers and hoes can’t get to it without a passport and plane ticket.

I’m serious. Stern has spent the past three years trying to move his league and players past the thug image Ron Artest’s fan brawl stamped on the NBA.

After this weekend, I’m convinced he’s losing the battle. All-Star Weekend Vegas screamed that the NBA is aligned too closely with thugs. Stern is going to have to take drastic measures to break that perception/reality. All-Star Weekend can no longer remain the Woodstock for parolees, wannabe rap artists and baby’s mamas on tax-refund vacations.

Are we ever going to hear anything about this ugly reality from Bobcat central? About Nelly and the “Harlem Nights” party in Vegas? About anything, at all, of substance from Bob Johnson?

No, no we are not. What happened in Vegas stays in Vegas.