When All You Have Is A Hammer, Every Headline Looks Like A Nail

As the media has covered the NBA’s severe punishment of Steve Ballmer and the Los Angeles Clippers as a result of the Kawhi Leonard investigation, a common idiom has emerged: League commissioner Adam Silver dropped the hammer on them. He did not throw the book at the Clippers, or take a crowbar to their knees. No, there was only one tool in his toolbox, and it was dropped on the perpetrators.

Obviously, this phrase is not unique to this specific scandal; anyone old enough will remember NFL commissioner Roger “Ginger Hammer” Goodell in the 2010s, when he was playing Whack-A-Mole so intently that he inadvertently created a league value system in which smoking weed was treated more harshly than domestic violence. But “dropping the hammer” is effective shorthand, a way to declare in a few words that authority has been wielded and a problem has been definitively solved. The book has been closed on the matter, perhaps because a hammer has nailed it shut. Silver and the NBA will happily accept this framing. It’s so easy that even Shams Charania and his endless metaphors couldn’t complicate it—if he hadn’t biffed the story, that is.

Still, it’s funny to see how many places are running with this exact choice of words. Some of these outlets add a little flair by specifying the type of hammer, or elucidating who was or wasn’t struck by it. Sometimes the hammer drops; sometimes it is brought down; sometimes “hammer” is the verb, leaving open the question of what hammer-like implement was used. (Could it have been a truncheon?) Below is a list of some hammerings.