This team is putrid. Diaw has been unbearable, and I agree that this is the norm. Last season was the anomaly. Go ask the Hawks and the Suns what they think about him.

I vote we get rid of Gerald Wallace while his stock is high. We might not be able to get anything back besides somebody’s leftovers, but who are we kidding? Do we really think this team has a chance to make the playoffs? Dump Diaw, Gerald Wallace, and any other older player possible. Tank the season, get a high pick in the gold mine that is the 2010 draft, and go from there.

In reality, the problem with this team comes down to 3 people. If Bob Johnson owned the team as Donald Sterling, they would be fighting for worst owners in the NBA. Michael Jordan is the worst token GM there is. Everyone knows he was hired as nothing more than an attempt to manipulate the fans with his “star power.” And that leaves Larry Brown, who is an excellent coach, but let’s be honest, the long term effect he has on franchises isn’t so positive. He turns crappy teams into pretty good teams, but does not build for the future at all. Look what the Pistons are going through now. The 76ers are still trying to figure it out.

We either need a genius GM like R.C. Buford or Sam Presti, or someone like Mark Cuban as an owner who couldn’t care less about the bottom line as long as he gets to travel the country cheering his team on.

End rant.

I’m one very happy Bobcats fan tonight.

No, I’m not on drugs.

Wellll, okay so I AM on drugs, but that’s because I’m also crippled into a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I should say I’m not on any new drugs.

But I have reasons for being so happy in the face of the sort of humiliating loss we prayed we’d not see again this season. Let me count the ways:

Henderson and Brown saw 35 minutes of action between them. Brown went 2 for 4, picked up a couple of boards and a pair of assists. Henderson only went 1 for 4, but put up similar stats to Brown the rest of the way across the line.

Najr Mohammed dropped in 13 points and came within a couple of rebounds of a strong double-double. Hell, even Ajinca saw over 7 minutes of action.

Looking over the checklist of suggestions, complaints, and howls of agony that the intrepid Rufus on Fire gang have presented here in recent days, it looks as if Coach Brown literally read it over and implemented it.

More minutes for the rookies – check!
More minutes for the bench in general – check!
More effort at penetration and less reliance on the long ball – che… uh, we did it for larger chunks of the game than usual tonight, so maybe a small check for that one.
Less turnovers – another small check. Until exhaustion set in we were holding onto the ball quite efficiently thankyouverymuch.

In addition, Tyson Chandler once again picked up 5 fouls (the stat sheet only shows 4 because the last one was mistakenly called on Henderson so the 4 is official) but he spread them out so well during the game that he was only briefly benched because of them. He got in a solid 33+ minutes – they weren’t terribly productive and he got served with a massive dunk from one of the smallest players in the league, but Rome wasn’t built in a day. He didn’t play well enough to warrant me taking back some of the nasty I dumped on his name last night, but he made a start.

Seriously y’all, I’m not joking about my optimism. We started the season with a similar road loss, albeit to a better team than Detroit threw at us, but there were reasons for that loss. The team was still learning plays and the only chemistry they knew was whatever they remembered from high school science. They also weren’t at full health – we had injuries and our players weren’t in condition.There were reasons for tonight’s loss too and I can make the case that many of them were the exact same ones we hit against the Celtics.

For example, We aren’t at full health – we still have an injury with Raja scratched for tonight. We also aren’t at full conditioning because many of the players we used tonight have almost as much rust on them as they do splinters in their butts from benchriding. Because of LB’s usage of the deep bench this game, our chemistry faltered as well.

What killed us tonight was energy, or more specifically, the utter lack of it. Our starters were dead on their feet by the start of the 3rd and it showed. We started forcing shots, turning the ball over, and by the start of the 4th quarter even some of our layups were rimming off the front of the iron. Coach Brown left them in there while once again we went from being in the thick of things to getting demolished. I wanted to shout halleliujahs when LB put Henderson and Brown in during the first half. But the damage was already done. Had he begun utilizing them last night against the Magic, our starters would have had enough juice left in Detroit to keep the fight going. If he’d started the third with our reserves and saved the starters for the 4th things would have been better as well. However:

In a lot of ways, this was the start of some major changes in the way our coach uses his roster and if he sticks with it I believe we’ll start doing a whole lot better on the back end of these back-to-back nights. I only pray LB doesn’t throw out the baby with the bath water and abandon the changes before we can enjoy some of the benefits.

This was a nasty, nasty night, but I truly think we may be at the beginning of a growth spurt for our young team and things will be looking up sooner rather than later. We aren’t going to win every night – we aren’t that good. We’re going to have some embarrasing nights this season – we aren’t that good. But if Coach looks at our scheduling and uses his bench wisely to set us up for the games we CAN win and we steal a couple of games here and there by good fortune, we’re going to have a real shot at the playoffs – we ARE that good.

Still, if you know of anyone out there willing to trade a steady 12 point and 7 rebound a night player for a center with an overpriced contract that averages more fouls than field goals a game, give me a call!

We’re holding some awful contracts, and we owe it to management, I agree.
This team is a failure to date, I agree. But there are 2 types of success in the NBA.
The first kind, of primary concern to the fans, is success in the standings. We aren’t going to see that for at least 2 more seasons – not tangible success the way I and I believe most others would measure it anyway. That would involve us becoming playoff contenders. The way the league is set up, new teams coming in are not going to have an easy road to the NBA finals. It takes 4-6 years to become serious playoff contenders and usually at least a decade to become something other than a flash in the pan. I’m talking about a REAL team with a future. That timetable involves a front office that makes almost zero mistakes in the first 5 years and we all know that doesn’t describe what’s happened in Charlotte. Miami and Orlando are now strong contenders each year to go deep into the playoffs, but how long have they been in business? What about the other expansion teams from about that time? Seen the Grizzlies and the Timberwolves making the Lakers and Celtics quake in fear anytime recently? What about our own former local boys? But what we need here in Charlotte is the OTHER kind of success:

Financial success is the only true measure of health in any professional sport. Bob Johnson’s pockets were simply not deep enough to weather the fan apathy that has manifested for his team. Championships cost money. Money comes from either an insanely wealthy owner/consortium or from fans. It isn’t a chicken or egg scenario. With 20K and more empty seats in the Cable Box every game we don’t have the high dollars coming in that this league requires to build a team. Yeah, you can fill the seats with a winning team, but the Hornets didn’t have to do that, did they? The sucked and still sold out the old Hive. They made some mighty idiotic decisions too! Chapman or Reid anyone? Was the OKafor deal any worse than the Mourning deal? The Bobcats organization had enough money to weather a certain amount of management stupidity without filling the seats and they’ve gone past that limit. The options are:

1. Sell a huge chunk or all of the team – a VERY real possibility, but Johnson and crew aren’t having much luck unless you consider Jordan’s buying still deeper. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad but like Kevin McHale in Minnesotta, MJ just can’t keep his hands off the team and trust anyone else to make the decisions. If they find a sucker – I mean interested buyer – there is always the risk they’ll head for greener pastures and leave us without a local team again. You may think there aren’t many options for relocation, but places like Boston and Chicago are large enough markets that a second team in the neighborhood could catch on. I don’t like to think about how long it will take to bring a new franchise back to the Carolinas again when any potential owner will be looking at the Bobcats attendance sheets as the main revenue potential.

2. Cough up the coin to eat $30 million in bad contracts and then spend enough to build something real from scratch – not gonna happen in Charlotte anytime soon.

3. Get creative with the marketing – this is actually happening. The Cats have gone all out to bring in new corporate partners and increase sponsorship and as much as we shudder and even laugh at companies like Spongetech, they’re keeping the team alive for us. There are some VERY attractive ticket prices and packages out there as well. Supply and demand is in effect right now and with the supply far outstripping the demand it is definitely a buyers market for the fans. Enjoy it while you can because if this team ever does catch on, those prices will be gone forever. I’m originally from a town where the waiting list for season tickets to an baseball team that went amost a century without a championsip is over 6 years long. In short, if we don’t go to the games once in a while we have ZERO reason to whine when the team is called the Sheyboygen Bobcats in a few years. If we don’t buy the team swag and gear then don’t complain when the only thing going on at the Cable Box is Disney on Ice. (by the way, I’ve seen Disney on Ice and for an old dead guy, he didn’t look half bad.)

Either way, and for whatever combination of reasons from crappy draft/trade decisions to a big empty room with a hyperactive announcer in the middle of it, we’re not going anyplace fast in the standings until the owners are in the financial position to say, “screw the luxury tax, we’re building a winner!” Like it or not, this is our team. I’m not saying this to anybody in particular. Call this a State of the Team report for anyone who needs it.

We are in the position now where we must either hope our boys pull off enough excitement to put fans in the house (the decision to bring LB into town was an attempt to do this) or get skunk-rotten for the remainder of this season. We can’t afford to linger in low-end mediocrity any longer. The team will hemmorhage to death one drop of blood at a time. I guess I’m a weirdo on this level. I’d rather we lose 70 games and get involved in what looks to be a WHOPPER of a draft than see us finish 9th in the conference again. Whether we win 15 or 45 however, I’ll still be cheering for Bob’s Cats. I’m a fan, it’s what I do. I won’t wring my hands over past stupidity, just pray the owners can overcome it. I’ll also scream, complain, and howl with each new act of stupidity and keep looking for ways that things can be made better. As a fan, I get the privilege of doing that too. Why? Because the alternative is best summed up by something I don’t want to deal with – The Sheyboygen Bobcats and a nightmare sentence I don’t ever want to hear again:

“Man, I sure miss the days when the NBA played in the Carolinas.”