As always, it’s disgusting that we need to have this discussion. I also don’t like how the word “flopping” sounds, so that makes talking about it even worse.

LeBron James is one of those guys, like Dwight Howard and Blake Griffin, who gets hit with unreasonable frequency when he plays physical basketball. I’m well versed on this principle because I’m a small guy, so when I play pickup ball, most everyone is one of those guys. It’s how you respond to someone being bigger and tougher than you — you even things out by encroaching upon their bigness and toughness.

This frustrated a young LeBron, and he resorted to arm flailing and outcries of pain, and he has been a flopper ever since.

The morality here is paradoxical. You shouldn’t flop, but fouls against you should be called. If the referees don’t take care of the latter, you resort to the former.

It’s understandable, right?

Well, that’s what a flop is.

The NBA defines “flopping” as “any physical act that appears to have been intended to cause the referees to call a foul on another player.” Let’s acknowledge that’s a very broad definition. It should probably be fine-tuned. Technically, taking a charge would be considered a flop by those standards; although the NBA stated minor physical reactions and “legitimate basketball plays” — including taking charges — wouldn’t be considered flops.

So players have taken “minor physical reactions” and stretched that as far as it can take them. Is falling over after contact minor? In some cases yes, others no.

It’s a mess. It’s unsolvable. It’s subjective and therefore not perfectly policeable. But the NBA could still be doing better.

LeBron James, David West and Lance Stephenson were all fined $5,000 for flopping in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals.

Erik Spoelstra’s reaction?

“We accept it.”

That’s a pretty solid indication that the penalty is not enough. If a player flops for an entire game and gets three calls he shouldn’t have, the $5,000 fine for his transgressions is well worth it. That extra game check he’s likely to get from winning will outdo the minor fine every time.

The fines increase with each violation. Next it’ll be $10,000, then $15,000, then $30,000 then it opens up to whatever discipline is deemed appropriate (which likely means a successfully appealed suspension).

This isn’t enough. The NBA is hesitant to fine players because it’s bad press.

In FIBA basketball, flops are assessed as a technical foul (which in FIBA counts toward players’ personal foul count), and I think that idea should be carried over to the NBA.

Have a committee whose job it is to review games and dissect every questionable call to determine if it was a flop. Be liberal with it. I watch NBA games and can tell you there should be more than one flopping violation assessed per game.

Assess technical fouls after the fact. In the NBA, a player with 16 technicals in the regular season or seven technicals in the playoffs is suspended for a game, and every second technical after that earns another one-game suspension.

Furthermore, flops within the last two minutes should count as two. These flops have a more direct impact on the game’s outcome and are more devastating to the integrity of the NBA.

Give referees the chance to assess these penalties in-game (meaning a flop in the last two minutes automatically gets you ejected), and like flagrant fouls, let each flop called be subject to video review. For those who hate how much video review is needed already in NBA games, keep in mind that this policy would greatly reduce the amount of flopping.

Furthermore, assess minor fines to referees for calling fouls on plays deemed as egregious flops. This would make referees hesitant to call fouls on plays in which players flop, and make them look closer for contact instead of letting a player’s reaction determine whether a foul should be called. This could turn the whole psychology of flopping on itself — if a referee is less likely to call a foul when you flop, then flopping serves no purpose.

A policy like this is severe and necessary. College basketball doesn’t have nearly the same caliber problem with flopping because college kids are too naïve to do anything other than play good basketball to try and win. The older these NBA guys get, the better floppers they become.

Shane Battier is a master flopper, and I wish he would leave the sport of basketball. His incessant flopping is distracting and is the biggest impact he has on games anymore. It influences and teaches younger players to flop.

He wants to win a championship. He doesn’t care about anything else. Ethics don’t faze him anymore. But flopping cuts to the core of the integrity of basketball. It breaches the competitive agreement of sportsmanship for the sake of manipulating officials into providing your team with an edge. It is cheating, simply.

It is for this reason that we must turn flopping into something with drastic consequences. Hike up the discipline so that players and referees fear it, and you’ll see that the game of basketball can be played at its highest level with competitive integrity.

Eliot is a senior in Media. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @EliotTweet.