  The impression gained from the literature published to date is that the
spectrum of the stadium billiard can be adequately described, semiclassically,
by the Gutzwiller periodic orbit trace formula together with a modified
treatment of the marginally stable family of bouncing ball orbits. I show that
this belief is erroneous. The Gutzwiller trace formula is not applicable for
the phase space dynamics near the bouncing ball orbits. Unstable periodic
orbits close to the marginally stable family in phase space cannot be treated
as isolated stationary phase points when approximating the trace of the Green
function. Semiclassical contributions to the trace show an $\hbar$ - dependent
transition from hard chaos to integrable behavior for trajectories approaching
the bouncing ball orbits. A whole region in phase space surrounding the
marginal stable family acts, semiclassically, like a stable island with
boundaries being explicitly $\hbar$-dependent. The localized bouncing ball
states found in the billiard derive from this semiclassically stable island.
The bouncing ball orbits themselves, however, do not contribute to individual
eigenvalues in the spectrum. An EBK-like quantization of the regular bouncing
ball eigenstates in the stadium can be derived. The stadium billiard is thus an
ideal model for studying the influence of almost regular dynamics near
marginally stable boundaries on quantum mechanics.
