Easy to say if you’re not a Bobcats fan. And probably wrong. A 44-win team contends for the conference title in the east, and especially a team which has demonstrated they can handle Cleveland, which this team most certainly has.

No hope for future glory? Does that mean they’re a decrepit old team where most of the guys are well beyond their prime? You mean like Gerald Wallace, and Boris Diaw, and Ray Felton? You mean DJ Augustin and Tyrus Thomas? Those old guys? Hell, Stephen Jackson is the only regular-rotation player over 30 who will be getting any minutes next season. (Temporary place-holder Nazr Mohammed was purely an accident and may well be supplanted by Ajinca or someone else next year.) These are silly off-hand comments from someone who doesn’t know this team and who hasn’t done the research incumbent upon a professional NBA analyst.
 
And what exactly is wrong with Stephen Jackson? So he takes a lot of shots, true. But then somebody has to shoot and this is a defensive team, first and foremost, which is— as someone who followed MJ’s Bulls teams should know— what wins in the NBA. Jackson is an excellent defender, an all-around hard man with all-around skills and savvy, and whatever it is he’s doing the team is winning with him whereas without him they were not.
 
Winning now if you can is much better than hoping to win (maybe) sometime down a long road. And to suggest that Larry Brown can be given an ultimatum of any sort is nothing short of ridiculous. LB has always done exactly what he’s wanted to do everywhere he’s gone and is always happy to pick up his ball and move on to the next stop. And to chase him away now, when he’s dragged a perennial expansion loser through mediocrity and into near-contention in less than two years, would be crazy in the extreme. LB goes and this team likely starts losing again. MJ’s primary task then is keep his coach happy, and if the team wins, the fans will come around. Whether he does this from a distance or with his ass at the end of the bench at every game is irrelevant.
 
In general, this is an ill-informed smart-ass off-the-top-of-the-head-against-a-looming-deadline sort of column from a guy who is probably not qualified to pass judgment on these things. (Of course, that’s the whole appeal of this column to a certain smart-ass hoops-fan demographic— you know, the guys who wear their baseball caps backward whilst listening to Jim Rome…)