There were a number of key matchups on Wednesday night. And there was also this game between the Bobcats and Hawks, whose fans probably feel like those of Level 2 Football League teams in England. The game did at least feature the Grand Reopening of Okafor’s House of Blocks-and-Rebounds. Emeka! Eureka! It’s so good to have the big guy back, and I was clearly not the only one to think so—Gerald Wallace (31 points, 9 rebounds, 4 blocked shots, 4 steals) looked happier than my dog slurping toilet water. Okafor only had a modest night statistically (9 points, 7 boards, 3 blocked shots), but his disruptive presence was obvious (just 40% shooting for Atlanta)—he’s the 252-lb 800-lb gorilla in the paint.

FSN South commentators Bob Rathman and “Sleepy” Steve Smith (nice guy, but I kept expecting to hear snoring sounds at any moment) referred to us as a “hex team” for Atlanta—as if they have a stellar record otherwise. True, Josh Smith (25 points, 15 boards, 6 blocks) is a phenomenal and underappreciated talent, but after that? Ugh. You know it’s bad when a player from the other team wins one of those little “sponsorship awards” they do throughout the game, as Wallace did when they made his steal-and-breakaway dunk the “Dodge Drive of the Game.” And Marvin (-arvin, rvin,) Williams was a friend of mine, but what do they have him hanging around the perimeter for? He had 12 and 10, but he was 4/14 from the field (including 0/1 on a missed 3-pointer) and more invisible than Sue Storm.

Okafor’s return down low also freed up our shooters from the outside, as the Hawks left Matt Carroll, Walter Herrmann, and Brevin Knight more unattended than a pack of middle-schoolers loitering outside a convenience store. Carrol hit 4/4 3-pointers for 19 points, while his blond buddy Herrmann had 13 points. Felton went for 10 points and 10 assists.

On a more somber note, Sean May has revealed he’s shutting it down for the rest of the season. Darn, there goes the playoffs. "The disappointment is we think we should be much better, but because of circumstances we're not,'' Coach Bernie Bickerstaff said afterward about the May injury. Those damned circumstances get you every time. But dry your eyes, coach, we’re hustling hard; we had ten steals. Once Coach Bickerstaff seeks out new life and new civilization next year, you’ll have set up whoever takes over for him with a hardworking team, one that stretched a 5-point halftime lead to 10 by the end of the third quarter, and to 14 at the end of the game. I don’t need a forecasting class to tell me that’s a positive trend.

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Sorry I didn’t get a chance to comment on Friday night’s game against the Sixers. I’m in a Forecasting class at school right now and I was working on an insanely difficult assignment–the handout for the project itself was 9 pages of single-spaced, 10-font instructions. I took this class ostensibly to help me predict things like market share but secretly to help me pick football games (in the final project we have to take a series of data sets—of our choosing—and use software to help us make predictions—hmmm, wonder what topic I’ll pick there). So anyway, because I was overburdened with work and because the Bobcats played back-to-back games (and because both games were really depressing in their own way) I just decided to combine the recaps into one.

If you were looking for a good game Friday night…then I hope you flipped over to the NCAA Tournament, because the 76ers-Bobcats game was awful. Charlotte was run over by a Philly team that was playing without Andre Iguodala, their only legitimately good player. The other Andre—Miller, that is—had 19 points, 9 assists, 6 rebounds, and was impossible to contain despite the fact that he’s slower than a 3-legged dog. Steamin’ Willie Green had 18 points and 6 boards, Stephen Hunter had 18 and 9 and made every single shot he took—he shot more accurately than Rick Hunter. Lord, must I go on? Are you getting the picture? It was horrible.

For the first time, I started to liken following the Bobcats to some sort of experiment to see how much I can take. I’m beginning to feel like the guy in Supersize Me!, only instead of bad food, I’m trying to show what watching months of bad basketball will do to you. And to make things worse, lately commentators Matt Devlin and Henry Williams come back from every commercial break holding up some sort of cheap promotional merchandise you can buy (usually made by some company/guy called “Crazy Fred”) and there’s even a "ShopBobcats.com" graphic that blinks on and off, QVC-style.

And have you noticed how many shady financial/insurance companies we’re in bed with now? We’ve got Geico, which has gotten so huge they now have 2 mascots, the gecko and the cavemen (wasn’t that a crappy 80s/90s band that a bunch of early indie prototypes insisted rocked? No wait, I’m thinking of Echo and the Bunnymen–sorry), State Farm (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there…except when your entire neighborhood floods in a massive human tragedy, because we sure as hell aren’t going to cover that sort of thing—try the Red Cross”), Lending Tree (“When banks compete, they end up making some terrible subprime loans”), and on and on.

Anyway, the best thing about the Philly game was that it ended. On Saturday, Raymond Felton and Gerald Wallace were out with injuries that were basically just exhaustion-related. "We need to make sure the guys get two days off. The bodies just need to recover,'' Coach Bickerstaff said, sounding like Lindsey Lohan’s publicist every time she checks into rehab. This meant that we started a somewhat ridiculous lineup of Brevin Knight, Matt Carroll, Walter Herrmann, Adam Morrison, and Jake Voskuhl. That’s right, we were one Steve Blake-for-Brevin Knight trade away from a Bill Simmons “Whitewash.”

Devlin did me a tremendous personal favor early on by clearing up the whole Herrmann pronunciation controversy. Apparently, “they” came to Devlin and Williams and said that Walter’s surname is in fact pronounced like plain old “Herman.” So I’m just glad to put it behind me, and I take back everything I said about the Cleveland announce team (actually, just this part).  Now if some sort of authority would just do this with Mehmet Okur’s first name, maybe by circulating a “Mehmet memo” Ha!! Don’t forget to tip your waitresses…

Speaking of Walter, he had another 17 against Philly and put up 20 and 6 against New Jersey and is playing pretty darned well (and have you seen how focused he is when he runs? He reminds me of the Terminator 2 bad guy). It’s kind of funny seeing stuff I wrote about him months ago now cropping up in national publications (e.g., the Fabio comparisons, “Herrmann Monster,” etc.). Just remember: I was making fun of Walter before it was cool.

The other bright spot of the past few games has been Alan Anderson, who had another 12 points against NJ and was a real presence in the lane. I’m starting to think a good coaching technique would be to make rookies and young players watch video footage of D-League guys doing things like staying in Super 8 Motels and taking 15-hour bus rides from Tulsa to Sioux Falls; it’d be like a "Scared Straight" program that would hopefully motivate them to try harder. Anderson is clearly playing as if he’s terrified at the thought of having to go back and play for someone like the Dakota Wizards.

As it happens, the Bobcats welcomed back Vince Carter (Ha! I'll be at Jake's Comedy Club on Friday…) to NC and very nearly pulled out an upset over the Nets. It took a last second, improvised alley-oop by Carter off a desperate Jason Kidd airball just to tie it and send it into OT. In the extra frame, VC took over with 10 points and the Bobcats ran out of gas, diesel, solar power, alternative energy sources, slave galleys, or whatever they were miraculously running on in the first place to keep it so close. Carroll had 27, Voskuhl had 14, Knight had 15 and 8. It’s sad, really, because we’re taking on the Hawks and the Bucks next, we just had Philly…the schedule really favored us at the end, it’s just too bad we didn’t have enough guys to make it happen—makes me want to break into Tiffany’s “Could’ve Been”…

After the game, by the way, when reporters asked VC about his upcoming free agency this summer, he said, “As of right now, I'm a Net. I'll always be a Net, so we'll just go from there when it's time.” When Carter speaks, you can almost see the fine print—maybe State Farm is an appropriate NBA sponsor after all…

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The Bobcats defeated the Celtics Wednesday night in a game that probably had Red Auerbach stubbing cigars out on himself in the grave. After watching the Celtics squander an 18-point lead, all I can say is, if they want Kevin Durant that much, they can have him—they’ve earned it. Forget the 18-point lead: Boston led by 10 with 9.5 minutes to go and the Bobcats playing about as coherently as Borat. Up 74-64, Boston committed 4 fouls, 3 turnovers, and a missed lay-up over the next 6 minutes before their next field goal. By the time the smoke had cleared and the echoes from the referees' whistles had died down, Charlotte was comfortably up by six and Doc Rivers was calling up Alberto Gonzales for tips on stonewalling the press.

For most of the night, it was the Jefferson and Pierce show. Good thing the Celtics don’t have anyone else named after a 19th century president, otherwise Charlotte probably would have been down 30. Al Jefferson purchased a Louisiana-sized level of respect from me with 22 points and 11 boards. Meanwhile, Paul Pierce scored 22 points and had 2 steals, but he sustained a cut inside his mouth off an inadvertent Gerald Wallace elbow with 4 minutes to play in the 3rd quarter and didn’t return, and thus he failed to prevent the civil war that ensued. Kendrick Perkins had 13 points and 11 boards as well. Overall, Boston had more free throws (22/27 to 15/19) and rebounds (51 to 36), but they were done in by 21 turnovers and an abysmal 2/11 on 3-pointers. They also have Brian Scalabrine on their team.

And Sebastian Telfair didn’t even play until the fourth quarter!? Good lord, has he gotten that bad? I thought it was bad enough when he lost his spot to Delonte West, but now Rajon Rondo plays over him, a guy no bigger or skilled than Bow Wow (and possibly less skilled—I watched that Celebrity All-Star Game). The moral of that story, kids, is never have a gripping, compelling basketball documentary made about you (see: Through the Fire, Hoop Dreams, and of course Eddie).

The Bobcats were led by the usual cast of characters: Raymond Felton, Gerald yadayada—WHOA, wait a second, Alan Anderson had 14 points! I love how the NBDL has become the NBA’s equivalent of growing up in the projects. Every time an NBDL vet makes an NBA roster, all we hear about is how we just don’t know how bad it is down there, and how thankful they are to have made it out alive. Anderson probably dedicated this game to his homies back in Tulsa. Welcome back, Alan! Just remember to keep it real.

And finally, the most unsettling part of the game: one day after I lambasted Cavaliers commentator Scott Williams for pronouncing Walter Herrmann’s name like “Herman,” now Matt Devlin and Stephanie Ready are doing it too—with no warning, no explanation, no anything. All year we’ve been giving it the soft “H” and stressing the second syllable, and now it’s just plain old “Herman.” What is going on here? I feel like I’m in the twilight zone. Have I gone mad? Has someone stolen my identity? Am I in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse, possibly involving Sandra Bullock as some sort of special agent? And if so, am I the hunter or the hunted?

I think I know what it might be: those disturbing “Sprite” ads that line the scorer’s bench. Have you ever noticed those things? There’s something really sinister about them, particularly if there are a series of transition possessions and the camera has to pan back and forth. You end up repeatedly getting the message “OBEY Sprite OBEY Sprite OBEY Sprite” implanted in your brain. It’s evil. Whatever happened to that wise-cracking little doll that used to trash-talk with LeBron? The one that looked like Josh Childress with black sunglasses? He just vanished…

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Okay, let’s face it: the Bobcats aren’t making the playoffs this year. Worse, they’re probably not terrible enough to get a very high draft pick. So we’re just playing it out right now, and if the Bobcats’ season were a Megadeth album, it’d be Countdown to Extinction. But I’m going to keep watching, because they play hard and because I love them. And that’s what love does to you—like my man Huey Lewis said, it’ll change a hawk to a little white dove.

And how satisfying was the ‘Cats win against Cleveland on Tuesday? The answer: very. There’s plenty to dislike about Cleveland, starting with their schizophrenic uniform selections. I mean, what was with those dark red duds they were rocking last night? Oh wait, those are their regular jerseys. The Cavs wear so many alternative and retro get-ups it ends up looking weird when they’re just dressed normally—they’re like Andre 3000 that way. Why is Cleveland so eager to celebrate its crappy past teams, anyway? Do they really feel a need to commemorate the 86-87 Cavaliers? You don’t see this with other organizations; Pepsi doesn’t occasionally put out retro six-packs of Apple Slice soda; U2 doesn’t do limited tours featuring only songs off the Pop album. And what colors are the fans supposed to get behind, the dark red? Dark blue? Gold? Pumpkin orange?

Even more of an embarrassment, however, is Cleveland’s announcing duo of Scott Williams and Fred McCleod. The two actively try to instigate fights by always painting the opposition as arrogant punks. This is fine when the Cavs are playing a good team, but why in the world would the Bobcats be acting like jerks? We’re 25-43, for God’s sake. Even if Gerald Wallace is trash-talking to Eric Snow (as they incited), it’s more ridiculous than anything else, it’s like Hans and Franz.

I can understand McCleod’s shameless antics—the man makes Tommy Heinsohn sound like Walter Cronkite—because he’s in the former player/colorman role, so that’s basically his job. But what on earth is Scott Williams’ deal? At the buzzer to end regulation, Matt Carroll grabbed a rebound and was basically chop-blocked by a Cavalier. No foul was called, which isn’t really surprising, but then Williams says, “They’re crying here in Charlotte, but the strip appeared to be all ball…(awkward pause as Williams watches replay, in which Carroll appears to be caught in the old third grade trick where one kid kneels behind him and the other guy pushes him over)…maybe he got a little of the lower body.” I’ve heard less biased commentary from Jerry “The King” Lawler. Williams also spent the game uttering little gems of incomprehension such as, “The Bobcats play quite a bit of zone from time to time.” Most egregious, however, was Williams’ mispronunciation of Walter Herrmann’s last name as “Herman,” as in “Pee-Wee Herman.” Actually, what’s funny is McCleod started off the game pronouncing Herrmann’s name correctly but gradually drifted over to the way Williams was doing it, so by the end of the game it was “Herman this” and “Herman that” out of both knuckleheads. For kicks, I actually began visualizing Pee-Wee Herman out there, getting t’d up by telling the refs, “I know you are but what am I?”

Perhaps the reason it got so annoying is because Williams and McCleod ended up saying Herrmann’s name a lot. Walter went off for 19 points and 10 rebounds in 40 minutes of action. He got plenty of run not only for his effectiveness, but also because heading into the game the Bobcats had less manpower than The View. Last night’s All-DNP Team consisted of Brevin Knight at the point, Derek Anderson at the 2, Sean May at small forward, and Emeka Okafor at the 4. I guess our injury team was short a center, but not if you count Ryan Hollins, who didn’t play.

Cleveland, meanwhile, was coming off their 8th straight win and finally seems to be clicking. 22-year-old LeBron James hasn’t played this well since he was 21, Aleksandar Pavlovic has somehow become the second good young talent (after Jason Kapono) we’ve given away in our three-year history (plus he’s gone all Fight Club on us by shaving his head and morphing into a bad-ass). And what’s the deal with Larry Hughes, is he an overrated mediocre player or an underrated good player? I can never decide. I’ve also got to hand it to Anderson Varejao—as annoying as he is, the dude takes more charges than an E-Z Pass.

Most of the game was a debacle. We were frequently down by more than ten, and we committed 20 turnovers, 9 of them by Raymond Felton. I’m starting to dread Felton’s drives to the hoop, because the other teams have learned to collapse on him—it’s like watching Daniel trying to take on 4 Kobra Kai at once. But Gerald Wallace kept us close (as usual) with 27 points, 11 boards, and 5 blocks (although that was not enough for Williams to declare that Snow “shut him down”). Adam Morrison had 13 and Carroll had 20.

In the game’s zany final minute of regulation, Carroll hit two free throws, stole an inbound, got fouled, and hit two more free throws to tie it. In overtime, first Morrison dropped a 30-foot laser-guided bomb to put us in front. Then Felton finally broke through with a drive, a lay-up, and an elbow to Varejao’s face, thereby exorcising all of his demons in one play. And then Herrmann hit a 3-pointer to ice it, which was perfect, because we got to hear Williams mispronounce his name one last time, and this time he did it all slow and dramatic: “Herman shoots, Herman scores. Walter…Herman.” I think from now on I’ll pronounce Williams’ last name “Will-EYE-ams.” Whatever…the man’s an assweepay.

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