The 10-11 Charlotte Bobcats are 7-13.  They just lost a demoralizing game to a terrible team.  People are starting to get called out.  Despite flashes of promise, the ball seems to be rolling decidedly downhill.  In the standings, the playoffs are close (1 game out), but in reality they feel a mile away.  Sound familiar?  It should - eerily so - if you were a fan of the 09-10 Bobcats.

December 20th, 2009.  The Bobcats are 10-16.  Despite some bright spots after the arrival of Jax, they had just lost three in a row to descend to their low point of the season, two of the losses to lousy squads in Indiana and New York.  The locker room was rumbling and grumbling with Gerald Wallace calling out Tyson and Boris for a lack of effort down in the paint (which, watching our season opener this year, it doesn't seem that Tyson ever really got over).  Everyone knew that the playoffs weren't out of reach in the lowly East, but nobody looked at our squad and saw a team that would scare anybody.

To put it bluntly, we've been here before.  I seem to be decidedly in the minority by preaching optimism here, but I think we'd all do well to remember that the biggest difference in the December 09-10 Cats and the December 10-11 iteration of the team is our expectations.  We played a lousy first quarter, but there's a lot of ball still to come.  This thing ain't done by a long shot, and think of it this way - if Saturday in Philly turns out to be the bottom for this year's Cats, it will have come a couple weeks earlier than it did for last year's version.