When a team gets no coverage at all from the national media (and let’s face it, until this year our boys certainly deserved that lack of attention,) this is the kind of article one sees— and will see far more of as the season wears on— as “journalists” scramble to become the first guy at their shop to cover the breaking story. Conventional wisdom augmented by one game’s observations, tossed as a salad, smirking smartly all the while.

It is amusing to see how the rest of the hoops world sees it. The Bobcats’ development is not something easily modeled from prior experience. From now on therefore, every article like this will iikely compare Larry Brown to Don Nelson. I personally don’t see the similarity—LB is about as conservative a coach as one can find in the modern era: defense first and last, slow down the pace, rookies playing significant minutes is out of the question, whereas Nelson really is the fringe “mad scientist” who will do everything and anything to confuse and destabilize, to the ridiculous extreme of having Manute Bol shoot threes.

Whenever I read one of these articles, I recall the experience of listening to two lawyer buddies of mine, brothers in fact, pontificating in the early 80s upon who amongst the SNL cast was talented as if either one had the slightest understanding of the craft of professional humor. Or their analysis of the relative merits of rock’n’roll bands as if they had an ounce of soul between them. I remember an argument in which they were both quite forceful in their assertion that Poco is/was a far greater and more important artist than Iggy Pop. And I’m thinking “you just don’t get it, do you?” But as attorneys they were effective arguers and after a while I realized it didn’t matter whether they got it or not. They were happy in their successful staking out of what appeared to them to be a defensible position.

The “journalist” who finds himself in a spot where he has to write an article about a team he’s never seen is in more less the same quandry, I would think. Can’t (yet) hold it against him— if he persists in his inaccurate characterization of the team once they become a bigger story and he has had more of an opportunity to learn what’s what here, then he’s a boob. For now though, he’s just superfluous, though it is nice to see someone other than insiders even mention the Cats in the national press.