Here we go again.

We’d been waiting for more than a year to see which player would be the first of the post-Artest era to jump into the crowd, and on Wednesday we finally got our answer. Instead of some wild young hothead like Danny Fortson or Steve Francis, it was the most unlikely of candidates – New York’s gentlemanly veteran forward Antonio Davis.

It’s hard to summon much blame for Davis considering the circumstances. He ran up the steps to check on his wife and then returned to the court without so much as patting a fan on the shoulder, let alone throwing haymakers a la Artest and Stephen Jackson. What’s more,nobody can argue that Davis’s reason for entering the crowd – ensuring the safety of his loved ones – was far more honorable than Artest’s quest for a butt to kick as retribution for a shower of stale Miller Lite.

Nonetheless, Davis will find his wallet about a $500,000 lighter after the league slapped him with a five-game suspension without pay yesterday for his actions. Nobody who follows the league was terribly surprised. Commissioner David Stern and company have cracked down hard on disciplinary matters since the Malice at the Palace, which gave the league an a black eye at a time when ratings were already in decline.

Since then, the league has basically adopted what might be called the “Fight Club” rule toward players entering the seats. Rule no. 1 is: You do not go into the crowd. Rule no. 2 is: You DO NOT go into the crowd.

This approach is reasonable on its surface.No matter how abrasive, abusive, or flat-out stupid a fan is acting, he is a paying customer and the first rule of business is that the customer is always right. The NBA cracked down so hard on the Pacers last year because of a logical fear that fans would stop embracing the sport if players kept attacking them.

Nonetheless, the league’s emphasis on player behavior has removed a spotlight from the area where they really need to focus: security. Davis entered the stands because his wife was involved in a scuffle with a fan and he wasn’t sure anybody was making an effort to break it up. Depending on who you listen to, Davis’s wife, Kendra, was either the target of abusive hecklers or lost her wits and went after a regular guy who happened to be cheering for the other team.

(Incidentally, the Bulls fan, Michael Axelrod, declared yesterday that he will sue the Davises for more than $1 million for battery because Kendra Davis tried to scratch him. I grew up with three sisters, so using his logic I should be richer than Bill Gates by now. But I digress.)

Regardless of what happened,placing a blanket ban on players going into the crowd isn’t going to solve anything unless the NBA addresses the other half of the equation. This isn’t the NFL, where 10-foot cement walls surround the playing field, or baseball, where players can retreat to the relative safety of a dugout. The proximity of fans to the benches and playing surface is both the greatest appeal and the greatest danger of pro basketball, and the league has to work at controlling the fans as much as it controls the players.

The Artest case was a good example. Detroit’s arena security was AWOL throughout, despite abundant complaints from visiting teams about the hostility of the place. Nonetheless, the league acted as if the Pacers players were entirely to blame and the Detroit organization, which created the conditions, had no fault whatsoever. If the Pistons suffered any kind of rebuke at all from the league from their shoddy handling of the event, the league certainly didn’t tell anyone about it. In fact, the Pistons benefited more than anyone from their own inability to protect the opposing players, as the incident ended up neutering one of their strongest Eastern Conference challengers.

The lesson the league tried to send the players was clear: Don’t go into the crowd. But the underlying message to fans was just as clear: If you want to take the opposing team’s best player out of the lineup, throw a beer at him and see what happens, because the players will take the blame for whatever happens next. Since the league has already absolved fans and teams from any responsibility, they effectively have nothing to lose.

Davis’s situation takes it a step further – players’ families are also in danger. While Davis’s wife may or may not have been the instigator in this case, it’s unrealistic to enforce a ban on players going into the seats unless they know their loved ones can watch the game in peace.

That can only happen if and when NBA arenas take security more seriously than they have until now.Other than a post-September 11 focus on searching fans for weapons, there has been little effort throughout the league to make its arenas safer.This can be seen in big matters, such as the haphazard attention given to security for visiting teams and their families, and small ones, such as the narrow court exit in Detroit that prolonged to the mayhem by preventing the Pacers from leaving quickly.

Of course, increasing security costs money. Hiring extra police isn’t cheap, and redesigning that bottleneck at the Palace would require ripping out expensive seats. “Setting examples,” however, costs virtually nothing. So Antonio Davis, like Ron Artest before him, has become the league’s official example of What Not to Do. He gets a five-game ban, and the league gets to sweep its security problems under the rug.

This solution, however is a mere Band-Aid – the product of a system that may delay the inevitable, but won’t prevent it. Hear me now: At some point in the near future there is going to be another Artest situation, because none of the basic ingredients that created the last one have changed. And unfortunately, the commish may not realize it until the next Malice at the Palace does irrevocable damage to the league.