Nope, it's explicitly stated that Deathstroke managed to disable the ring by just touching it and then telling it to stop working, because apparently Lantern Rings are made to standards that Korean sweat shops would consider shameful.
You are wrong about this, as Deathstroke explicitly started the fight with Green Lantern by
breaking his fingers, which is another great way to break someone's concentration.
Then it bullshitted him being able to cold-cock Flash as "Deathstroke is sooooo awesome that he can predict where the Flash is going to go and then put his fist where the Flash will try to dodge".
This is also wrong, since Deathstroke used
explosives to force Flash to go where he wanted him to. You know, that "setting up the battlefield ahead of time" thing you extol the virtues of.
Going back to refresh my memory of the scene in question, he apparently took down the entire JSA in that fight. All of them. At once. While standing stock-still in the middle of the street. Bull. Fucking. Shit. There is no quantity of drugs sufficient to make that sound plausible.
First off, you mean the JLA, as taking down the JSA is a whole 'nother discussion.
Second off, keep in mind that there were only three real heavy hitters in that fight: Flash, Zatanna, and Green Lantern. As mentioned, he prepped the battlefield to make Flash go where he wanted. He dealt with Zatanna next by
exploiting the fact that she has to speak her incantations and the fact that for some bizarre reason, she never enchanted her costume to act like armor. And I don't think you can argue that a prepared Deathstroke
couldn't take down Green Arrow, Black Canary, the Atom, and Hawkman all at once.
Most of the following two paragraphs is conjecture, but I feel it to be reasonable conjecture. At this point in his story, Kyle is undeniably a
rookie; my guess is that the only reason he's not with the Teen Titans instead is because he's too old. So, as a relative rookie, the reason he didn't act sooner could easily be because he couldn't think of a way to hurt Deathstroke without risking his teammates (most of whom were in close-quarters range, the way Deathstroke likes to fight), or just because he didn't realize the guy was a threat and then all of a sudden his team's dropping like flies.
So now it's just Kyle Rayner. Sure, he has the most powerful weapon on the planet on his finger, but he also has self-confidence issues up the wazoo at this point because he feels like he can never measure up to Hal Jordan. (This last bit is verifiable fact if you've ever read a comic with Kyle in it before Hal came back. Plus, even if you don't believe me on that, the guy is literally a struggling artist who is supposed to do the job of an
entire Corps. That would be enough to cause nearly
anyone to have confidence issues.) Now the success or failure of the mission rests on him, and he's not sure he can do it. His more experienced teammates just tried, and got trounced like amateurs. How can he do what they can't? He hesitates, just as Deathstroke was planning for him to, which weakens the ring's automatic shielding enough for Deathstroke to break his fingers and instill more fear, which turns into a self-defeating pattern of doubt, pain, and despair that essentially turns the will-powered ring into a fancy piece of jewelry. Perfectly reasonable when you remember that the ring runs on willpower and that Kyle was struggling in that department at that point in his story.
Finally, your position that the writers were just trying to Worf the League to make Deathstroke look good seems rather unlikely, because he's dealt with speedsters before (possibly even the same speedster, if
this is anything to go by) and Zatanna has an easily-exploitable weakness to go along with her immense power. However, Deathstroke
actually wasn't certain if his plan for Green Lantern would work, at least if Green Arrow's perspective has anything to do with it (which, as a veteran superhero who's trained in martial arts and thus understands body language, seems to be a reasonably good source). Since it clearly
did stop Kyle from using his ring for that fight, it looks mostly like his plan for Green Lantern was just the one he thought was his best shot, and it worked. Literally everyone else in that fight was working with roughly baseline-level human durability, so I find it quite bizarre that you seem to think any of the rest of it was implausible.
Although, since the scans I provided clearly prove that you were wrong about a number of things in that fight, perhaps you were simply operating off of faulty memory and
didn't actually go back and check the way you said you did.
Specifically, citation needed that this was the case at the time that storyline was printed.
