You wouldn’t know it from most media coverage of the Biogenesis scandal, but baseball is hardly the only professional sport connected to the anti-aging clinic. According to one former employee, Biogenesis had “hundreds” of clients from a wide variety of sports, including boxing, tennis, MMA, the NCAA and the NBA. However, while MLB investigators aggressively pursued the case and chased down every lead, the others did relatively little.

It begs the obvious question: what would happen if the NBA conducted a similar investigation? How deep would the rabbit hole go? A few players (Rashard Lewis, Hedo Turkoglu) have tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs over the years, but basketball has escaped the wide-ranging scandals that have hit baseball, cycling and track and field. In that respect, the NBA’s lax approach has been a blessing in disguise.

Basketball lags behind many sports when it comes to combating PED’s. In 2012, the head of the World Anti Doping Agency called the NBA’s testing procedures “insufficient.” The league only tests player’s urine, a far cry from the year-round blood tests cyclists take to create biological passports. The NBA has banned HGH for years, but there’s no way to catch users without a blood test. It’s not terribly hard for a player to deceive the current testing regime.

A basketball player with connections to Biogenesis shouldn’t be a surprise either. Muscle mass won’t make up for a lack of skill, but most would benefit from adding strength without losing speed. The stronger a player is, the easier it is for them to finish through contact, win fights for loose balls and hold position on the block. The majority of scouting reports for college players will say something like “he needs to add 10-15 pounds of muscle.”

The NBA game takes a terrible toll on player’s bodies. For six months, they are sprinting up and down 94-foot courts, beating on each other, flying high into the air and crashing to the ground. The league crams 82 games into a little over 24 weeks, with teams criss-crossing the North American continent on a nightly basis. It’s a long, brutal grind, without even counting two months for playoffs and international competitions in the summer.

Nevertheless, the NBA’s business model depends on its players being ready to go each and every night. Every franchise wants LeBron James and Kobe Bryant in their arena; that’s one of the reasons why the schedule can't be shortened. For some, the only sellouts all season are the games against the Miami Heat and the Los Angeles Lakers. If at all possible, the show must go on. There’s too much money on the line for it not to.

Just take a look at the league’s national TV schedule next season, which was released on Tuesday. The Lakers, fresh off losing Dwight Howard in free agency, are scheduled for a full complement of 25 games on ABC, TNT and ESPN. As long as they have Kobe, they are a marquee attraction, even when they are projected to fight for the No. 8 seed. Kobe is one of faces of the game, which is why his team is playing LeBron’s on Christmas Day.

By all rights, he shouldn’t be ready for that game, much less Opening Night. He tore his Achilles in April, an injury that normally takes 9-12 months to rehab. Kobe, however, is reportedly “shattering” that timetable. Is this the German knee procedure all over again? When it comes to rehabbing, how do you draw the line between modern medicine and PED’s? For that matter, why should you? If a PED existed that would let Greg Oden play basketball, it would be cruel not to let him use it.

There are a lot of old wives tales out there when it comes to steroids and PED’s, but the issue isn’t as black-and-white as it’s portrayed. If you poke around the internet, you can find a lot of holes in the conventional wisdom. Here’s an excerpt from an fascinating interview with Dr. Charles Yerelson, a Penn State professor and an expert on drug testing (courtesy of Amazin Avenue):

Q: Now, steroid-testing and the attempt to eradicate it from the game, is this a worthwhile and noble pursuit? Are there serious health risks we're talking about?

Look, you have never taken a drug that's going to be perfectly safe to all users, whether it's an over-the-counter medication or a prescription drug. They don't exist, and they probably won't exist in our lifetime. And then you say, "Well, it's relative." Are anabolic steroids a major killer drug? No, they are not. I would not as an epidemiologist come even close to putting them in the same category as tobacco, cocaine, amphetamines or heroin. No, they're not in that class. Can you hurt yourself with them? Yes, you can hurt yourself with aspirin, with ibuprofen; with sudamenafin you can kill yourself. If you take anabolic steroids in high doses for protracted periods of time it's difficult to think you could fool mother nature, that some adverse effects will not befall you. But they're not what I'd call major killer drugs. We use them in medicine, and I'd hope we're not purposefully killing our patients.

Whatever the benefits of keeping the NBA game “clean,” they are far outweighed by the costs. MLB is now spying on its players, which could have disastrous long-term consequences. None of the 14 suspended by Bud Selig this week failed a drug test. Instead, he turned baseball into a police state to catch them. Selig hired a former director of the Secret Service, purchased evidence and sued the man who ran Biogenesis in order to force him into becoming a cooperating witness.

The great irony is that in trying to make baseball look as clean as possible, Selig has only made his sport look dirtier. It’s a no-win situation, as the powers that be in track and cycling have found out as well. In all three sports, the more you look for cheaters, the more you find. The Tour de France has resorted to pointing out that the average speed of their races is down. That’s quite the pitch: our sport is no longer as entertaining as it once was! Come watch!

Selig apparently thinks that it’s in “the best interests of baseball” to destroy the reputation of its best players. However, while no player is bigger than the game, no game is bigger than its players either. In painting Alex Rodriguez as a villain, MLB is essentially cutting off its nose to spite its face. That’s a losing battle the NBA should want no part of. If we’re going to ask our athletes to do superhuman things, it’s only fair to look the other way when it comes to how they do them.