Brandon Knight has been the subject of relentless clowning on social media and elsewhere since DeAndre Jordan  nearly killed him with a dunk late Sunday night.

But now there's also been a predictable backlash against that bashing.

Yahoo Sports scribe Adrian Wojnarowski is the lead contrarian. He managed to remove the stick from his butt long enough to sit down and write a hilariously high-minded column headlined: “Backward culture makes punch line of Brandon Knight.”

He starts off praising Knight's work ethic before patronizingly defending Knight as if he's a 10-year old kid.

For this, (Knight is) a punch line now. He's a joke. For everyone celebrating Jordan's fantastic lob dunk over a guard some 8 inches shorter and 80 pounds lighter, they've made Knight an object of ridicule. . . . The message is clear to players everywhere, on every level: Run away. Hide. Don't try to take the charge. Don't try to disrupt the play. There's no reward. This is how backward the basketball culture has become, how twisted the value system.

Wojnarowski went on to say that Knight somehow shouldn't be clowned because he “had the guts to stand in there.” He dismisses Jordan as an overpaid, offensively limited player who dunked on a little guy: “And somehow that makes him an achiever in the sport now. After this, perhaps even a folk hero.”

To which the only response is: C' mon, son.

Props to Knight for trying to make the play (although one could make the case that it wasn't a good one because he came over late had no chance to stop Jordan from an and-1). But are we now only supposed to celebrate impressive plays if the players involved are of equal size? Should Jordan have simply flipped the ball in the basket to avoid embarrassing Knight? Should we give Knight an achievement medal for getting destroyed by a dunk?

No one is saying this play means Knight sucks and Jordan is great. Knight will still make his millions and be better at basketball than 99.9 percent of the people in the world. Jordan will still have the same weaknesses in his game; this play does not make him an "achiever,"  it just makes him that guy who nearly decapitated Brandon Knight with that dunk that one time.

People laughed because Knight lay on the court as if he were dead after the play. Knight even laughed at himself, thus adopting a shrewd technique that The Hater calls the Lil Jon Maneuver: the best way for a person to diffuse a national clowning is to join in rather than fight it.

Since Knight did this, does Wojnarowksi think he's also part of the "backward culture" he describes?

Professional sports are entertainment. Jordan's dunk on Knight was an entertaining play. So were the many memes that followed. Soon another funny thing will happen, people will laugh at that and everyone will move on from clowning Knight.

And people like Wojnarowski will tell us how wrong we are for having fun. The Hater has no use for those people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=sIDS3q3F0H4