Man, this is a really long break between games. The Bobcats won't have another three-day break until December 23-25, so here's hoping they're getting as much R&R as possible.

One of the comments in the Gerald Henderson thread struck me:

Well, on either Friday or Saturday, we’ll find out what the decision makers were thinking. Maybe it’s all part of some master plan by basketball masterminds and we’ll be posting here on Saturday night saying, "WOW, WHAT A GREAT IDEA! These guys really knew what they were doing!" Maybe they will come up with a combination that will leave the Hawks in shambles. Maybe the Cats will win 105-82. And maybe, just maybe, Elvis and Michael Jackson will duet the National Anthem to start the night off.

I've added the bold for emphasis because I think Ourdaywillcome has succinctly summed up the Bobcats' situation at the moment. Consensus holds that the team is either wandering aimlessly under fickle leadership, or there's some kind of plan that will only make sense after it plays out.

Please indulge me a baseball analogy. As you might have noticed at some point, my favorite baseball team is the San Francisco Giants. From about 1999-2004, they had an amazing stretch of success, but it was success marred by a general manager who did absolutely crazy things like intentionally giving up a draft pick in order to sign Michael Tucker. (Imagine giving up a lottery pick because you would rather have had Stephen Graham.) They had Barry Bonds juicing his way to the most dominant stretch of baseball anyone's ever seen, and they only got to one World Series because the GM kept insisting a collection of veteran proven mediocrities was more valuable than two or three proven impact position players and a bunch of unproven youngsters, to support Bonds.

Here's the thing: Every single sabermetrically inclined baseball fan I knew over that time hated the Giants' moves, but only in retrospect could we see the logic behind them and acknowledge that it was ultimately successful, even if that success came in spite of our GM. Sure, the team made mistakes and some players simply sucked, but the logic, apparently, was that players at the end of their careers, yet were still able to produce, were cheaper per their production than players in their prime, and our GM was probably explicitly exploiting that inefficiency that no one else was willing to exploit wholesale.

I'm big on process versus results when judging a front office's efficacy, and I'm often harsh on Larry Brown, et al, because their moves simply don't compute for me; I can't determine what their process is the way anyone can determine the Spurs' process after they landed Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili.

Matt from Hardwood Paroxysm has been scraping an idea together of what that logic is, but maybe I'm just too stubborn to understand what he's getting at. And maybe we'll just have to wait until Larry Brown's long gone to hear his thorough explanation.