Going Off The Rails
The Bobcats are two games into the worst road trip out west since The Shining. And just as it did with Jack Torrance, dementia is starting to spread in and around the team. Midway through the second quarter against the Lakers, with the Bobcats clinging to a semi-respectable 16-point deficit, color analyst Dell Curry speculated, “If the Bobcats can just keep Bryant, Bynum, and Gasol in check, and close out on the perimeter shooters, they could make this interesting.” Whatever you say, Wardell! It was a little like listening to Newt Gingrich describe his plans for colonizing the Moon. Curry might as well have been encouraging a guy in a wheelchair to just jump a little higher. Of course, the Bobcats did none of the above and lost by 33 in a game that should have been hauled off in a straitjacket.
Then in the following night’s contest, a 44-point castration at the hands of Portland, Coach Paul Silas issued this completely deranged analogy, spectacular in its inaptness: “If I had a full squad and we were losing this way, it would be awful. But you take (LaMarcus) Aldridge and (Gerald) Wallace off their team and see what kind of team you’d have.” Then his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he began growling “Redrum” over and over. First of all, I love how he considers the worst loss in team history to not be awful. Second, Silas was presumably attempting to compare DJ Augustin and Corey Maggette to Aldridge and (Saint) Wallace, which is so funny by itself that I can’t even add anything, so instead I’ll just end this sentence by linking to one of my favorite t-shirts.
Dumpster Grease Tire Fire Train Wreck Plane Crash
Like a recurring nightmare, the Bobcats and Wizards played again on Saturday night. My first impression was astonishment at what a large, lively crowd was on hand in Charlotte. Who were all of these self-flagellators, and is there a Guinness Book of World Records category for “Most Masochists in a Single Room”? At least they were semi-rewarded with Kemba Walker’s first triple-double, Boris Diaw’s biweekly check-in from the planet Neptune, and an outcome that was a clear improvement on the four prior games. But it was still a loss, and one that makes the Bobcats officially the worst team in the league.
Besides the obvious culprits—three disastrous possessions in the last minute of play and 12 missed free throws—I want to draw your attention to a particularly vomitous sequence late in the second quarter. The Wizards were up by 3 with Jan Vesely on the line. Vesely misses the free throw, but the Wizards get the offensive board and score. Then John Wall steals it from Diaw, leading to a Wizards dunk. Then Tyrus Thomas attempts a pass to a lucky fan sitting courtside, and it’s Wizards ball and they score. Then Diaw, as if annoyed at being shown up by Thomas, throws a pinpoint pass directly to Vesely—Jake Delhomme couldn’t have done it better himself. The Wizards didn’t score on this one, because they managed a dreadful pass of their own that was stolen by Walker, who—wait for it—makes his own terrible pass back to Vesely. But wait, Vesely gives it to Nick Young, who promptly passes it right out of bounds (I swear I’m not making this up). Thomas then simply misses an 18-footer (which at this point actually counts as progress), leading to a Wall travel, leading finally to a…Walker turnover. The two teams combined for 8 turnovers in 84 seconds, 4 in a row by the Bobcats. What had been a 1-point Wizards lead was now a 9-point lead in less than two minutes. What had been the Time Warner Cable Arena should now be called the Jonestown Arena.
Something to Look Forward to For Bobcats Fans
Wow! What a week for the Charlotte Bobcats.
Those of you that have read my rambling in the past know that I prefer not to go off on tirades on the current and very dire straits of the franchise. With that in mind, the above words are about the only thing I can really say. However, if I stop there this will not be much of a post.
So what in the world am I going to talk about if I’m not going to go off on these guys?
The future.
It’s kind of a bummer to have to go through a season of sucking (I’m still holding out a little hope that the guys will turn it around), but the benefit to that is a good shot at getting one of the top draft picks in next year’s lottery. With the number of talented players that are in the college ranks it is not hard to imagine which ones would be great fits in Charlotte.
So let’s do that. Let’s imagine who the Bobcats might get in the draft next year. Now of course it would depend on who comes out and who doesn’t, so for the sake of argument anyone the team could want will come out.
Also, I think we can look away from the guards. The team needs a big man more than it needs someone to spell Kemba Walker and D.J. Augustin. With that in mind, here are some of the big men that I wouldn’t mind seeing wearing the blue and orange in 2012:
Extremely Bad and Incredibly Awful
All I can say is, thank god for the Raptors and Thunder. After the Wizards started out the season 0-8, I checked to see when they were scheduled to play the Bobcats and circled it on the calendar—more like “skull-and-crossboned it.” As most of us probably remember, the Bobcats popped the Nets’ losing streak cherry back in the 2009-10 season after New Jersey started out 0-18. It’s not an embarrassment I was particularly interested in revisiting, especially when I have a group of co-workers who know I like the Bobcats, and who think of the NBA in general as a bunch of lazy thugs, who—when they are not brawling with fans—are busy choking their coaches. I only hear from these guys when the Bobcats and/or the NBA does something stupid (thus I hear from them more often than I’d like), and I’d frankly rather have my prostate examined while renewing my driver’s license at the DMV. Fortunately, the Wizards had already gotten their first win out of the way, so Wednesday night’s game was nothing more than an insignificant, humiliating meltdown.
What a relief, because those remaining Bobcats fans who hadn’t committed suicide by intermission might have noticed that Coach Paul Silas opted not to go with a center to start the second half. Considering our backcourt consisted of Kemba Walker and Matt Carroll, this was a strategy that was just crazy enough to…fail spectacularly. The lowlight had to have been Boris Diaw’s inexcusable failure to box out Rashard Lewis on Andray Blatche’s missed 32-foot hail-mary attempt to beat the shot clock. I’m totally befuddled why Gana Diop didn’t play more than 11 minutes—I know he’s out of shape, but has anyone taken a look at Blatche lately? Blatche keeps in game shape about as well as he solicits prostitutes, so I’m unclear why Silas decided to double-down on a tiny lineup.
Previewing the Game of the Century – Charlotte Bobcats versus Washington Wizards part I
Looking ahead at the first of two epic match-ups between the Bobcats and the Wizards, I took the opportunity to interview Kyle Weidie of the fantastic TruthAboutIt.net a phenomenally entertaining Washington Wizards blog.
Below are his thoughts on the Wizards.
Ziggy: What was the main reason Flip Saunders was fired?
Vulgar Display of Blogcat
Many causal NBA fans haven’t watched Charlotte play a single game this year. But they may have heard anecdotally about how the team was blown out by 39 against Miami or by 30 against the Hawks. And thus they have probably come to the easy, lazy conclusion that this team has played some bad games. But you know something? What these ignorant so-called “fans” don’t realize is that our Charlotte Bobcats have played other games, too, games like last night against the Nets…and those games are actually even worse. How awful was Sunday night’s game? I would make a prisoner watch it in order to beat a confession out of him. I haven’t watched something that depraved, sick, and twisted since that episode of Whitney. In fact, when talking about the Bobcats, I’m thinking of replacing the word “watching” with the phrase, “subjecting yourself to,” as in, “Hey, are you subjecting yourself to the Bobcats tonight?”
Sunday night was actually bad to the point of profundity. Through suffering comes enlightenment, and I’m convinced that all of us—in choosing to wat—I mean, subject ourselves to—this team, are not simply expressing our die-hard fandom but responding to a higher calling. Here’s how: People think of this as a golden age for basketball, with an amazing cast of stars and super-teams. But the Bobcats are so cover-your-eyes horrifying that maybe the real reason we’re here is to document that it wasn’t all wonderful for the NBA circa-2012. Bobcats Planet may actually be the NBA’s very own “How the Other Half Lives.” We’re the 99-percenters. The black people on Mad Men. After all, Raging Bull and Ordinary People weren’t the only movies released in 1981; so was Make Them Die Slowly. Thirty years from now they’ll uncover this website, and it will serve as a testimony to those faceless, forgotten, hopeless masses who didn’t live in New York, Chicago, Miami, and LA.
