I knew that the economy was in pretty bad shape at the moment, but I didn’t think that things were this bad. You may remember a few weeks ago when both Mario Chalmers and Darrell Arthur were sent home from the NBA’s Rookie Transition program after the two college teammates were busted in their room with weed and women (which is ironic because you’d think smoking weed with women in your hotel room would be part of the transition to being an NBA player).  Well, even though he wasn’t busted with them, there were rumors at the time that Michael Beasley had been in the room with both of them.

Turns out, he was. Beasley finally admitted as much to NBA officials yesterday, and it was a pretty costly admission as the NBA fined him $50,000 for it.

From the MIAMI HERALD:

Beasley - the second overall pick in the draft - admitted to league officials this week that he was part of the same incident at the symposium earlier this month in Rye Brook, N.Y. that resulted in Heat point guard Mario Chalmers and Memphis Grizzlies forward Darrell Arthur’s expulsion from the program and $20,000 fines. Beasley received a higher fine because of his failure to cooperate with the league’s investigation into the incident. The league’s investigation had ended but then Beasley opened up about having been, for at least some period, with Chalmers and Arthur in their room, where resort security found two women and detected the smell of marijuana.

”While we are disappointed with Michael’s involvement, we are pleased that he chose to come forward and stand with his teammate and accept the consequences of his actions,” Heat president Pat Riley said in a statement. “We are hopeful that both Michael and Mario have learned from this experience and we will have no further comment on the subject.”

Hopefully coach Riley can convince both of his rookies to spend more time hanging out with Dwyane Wade, as he’ll surely teach the two that marijuana is bad, and that cookies are the way to go if you wanna have a good time.

Still, this isn’t the best start to a career for Beasley, who had plenty of questions about his maturity and past before the draft thanks to some problems he had in high school. In fact, his past may have been what kept him from being taken with the first overall pick instead of the second.

At the same time, it’s kind of hard to blame Beasley. In case you hadn’t noticed, all three of the players involved in this have something in common: they all went to college in Kansas. Have you ever been to Kansas? There really isn’t anything else to do there except smoke some pot and watch the tornadoes go by.