The latest from long time BobcatsPlanet member TheBeagle on his March Madness / Charlotte Bobcats weekend.

A crazy, bewildering, fun whirlwind weekend wraps up. My love of the NCAA tournament and Tar Heel basketball is not something I conceal, so the fact that this past weekend played out like it did would be incredible in and of itself, but add in to that the fact that my dad’s old Army buddy (whose name I won’t drop here, out of modesty and privacy) who is longstanding icon of the Philadelphia sportswriting and talk-radio scene was in town to cover the regionals in Charlotte. I can’t even begin to explain the stories this guy has to tell, the people he’s spoken with, the person he was talking to in the living room Friday night (!!!!) on his cell……just a trip!! (I think I now have more dirt on the AI-Larry Brown feud than any professed NBA analyst that’s ever been employed at ESPN.)

Just a quickie: his forte is college basketball (covered every Final 4 since ’92, but a handful before that), but even in Philly he was surprisingly well-versed in our Bobcats. Covering Penn State basketball, he told me he was able to talk to JRich individually a handful of times when Michigan St played Penn St, and he said he is as genuine and good-natured as he comes off on-camera. Like us, he thought it was a great draft day trade for us when it went down. He’s a gamer who’s purpose is to continue to improve and help his teams win games. Like everyone else, he loves Jared, and told me he was the steal of the draft. Matt Carroll is the man; he went to high school 5 minutes from where the guy lives, and he knew the family very well. He was closer to his brother, Pat, since he went to St. Joe’s, but was very high on Matt and you could tell he was proud how hard the hometown Philly native worked to make it to where he is now. He was shocked at how little development Emeka has shown since UConn days, but he really thinks it has to do with such poor coaching since he’s been here…but there’s no coaching that can improve stone hands. He’s still high on Raymond and says everyone should calm down (the family friend telling me this is not a native Philadelphian, obviously, which explains his even keel and patience with athletes) and realize how much better of a PG he really is compared to the majority of PGs out there. He absolutely loves Gerald and thinks he’s one of the most freakish athletes in the league, and that he his actually a lot more well known around the country than I thought, which is a good thing; he deserves national recognition.

Well, due to sleep deprivation, he had to head off to sleep before the Sonics game was over, wishing them luck. At the time they were down by 1, and through persistence, they pulled it out and we won 2 in a row!

Saturday, through some miracle or another, he’s able to get me and my dad seats in Sec. 103 for the game, while he’s sitting on first row media table directly across for the Louisville bench. After some drama, and lots and lots of standing (no one sat down in the second half in the lower bowl that I know of), the Heels pull it out, and we get a really good view of the celebration and ritual net-cutting….that never gets old, even if it’s not the final net-cutting. Anyhow, we hang around, and the friend comes out and gives us his pressbook with all kinds of awesomeness in it (if you’re into sports collectible stuff that you can’t just go out and buy), and tells me I’m two for two that night. I smile and ask him what he means, and he tells me the ‘Cats just won their 3rd straight!!!

Me and dad didn’t get home ’til 2am (which isn’t all that late to me, but due to the craziness of the last few days, and lack of enough sleep) and we were worn slap-out, but damned if that wasn’t the best weekend I’ve had in recent memory.

I finished watching the Blazers game a couple hours ago, and I was amazed at the team I saw out there in the 4th. Sure, Roy was out, but the Blazers were gunning hard for this game, trying to get a win, and we took their best shot, and with stellar defense, and Raymond, chanelling Hansbrough and March’s past, put us on his back and we finish with an unexpected 3-1 road trip.

Wow, such a shame the players didn’t have the coach they needed, cause I know this is a playoff team. We’re every bit as good as Atlanta, and not far off from Toronto, Philly and Washington to boot. Oh well, some answers are starting to become clearer, and maybe with a change here and there, and a ping pong bounce here and there, next year will be what this year was supposed to have been!

As the season winds down and limps to a series of meaningless results, I thought I’d take a look at one of our most significant moves (or non-moves) of the upcoming off-season: what to do about Emeka Okafor. The two key numbers floating around the situation are his $5.4 million expiring contract and the $13 million dollar extension he refused at the start of the season. That was 4 months and another terrible-team-performance-in-a-mediocre-conference ago. Assuming the bridges haven’t been burnt between Okafor and management, Charlotte can still match any offers Okafor receives, and they’re free to unilaterally renegotiate with him in July. The question: what should they do?

First of all, I can’t stand visceral responses to questions like these. All they generally indicate is the respondent’s biases, which are usually dominated by what happened in the last five minutes. So let’s try a numerically-based response. I’m going to use John Hollinger’s PER statistic as a benchmark for performance, and I’m going to use, um, US American dollars as a benchmark for money.

Okay, currently, Mek sits 18th among power forwards in the PER rankings with a score of 16.64. Of the 17 guys ranked above him, the average salary is $9.5 million. Bear in mind, this spans the entire spectrum of salaries, from Carl Landry’s $400K to Kevin Garnett’s $23.8 million. Due to the wide range of numbers, it might be more instructive to choose the median value, or the middle salary of the 17 incomes. In this case, it’s Carlos Boozer’s $11.6 million (he’s ranked 5th). Either way you look at it, both the average and median incomes of the 17 players ranked above Okafor are LESS than what he rejected. Probably the biggest red flag in there for the Okafor camp is that Rasheed Wallace–ranked 15th on the list and with a far beefier resume than Omeka–only scores $12.5 million in annual income. If I’m Okafor’s agent, I might be a little nervous right about now.

One card Team Okafor might play is Emeka’s durability. This would have been utterly ridiculous before the season began, given that his average games-played coming into ’07-08 was just 55. Yet Okafor’s played a surprisingly robust 71 games this year, while the average games-played of the 17 guys ranked above him is just under 62. At first, this might seem like promising leverage for Okafor, given a guy like Chris Bosh, who pocketed $13 million this year while only appearing in 56 games so far. However, the salary-per-games-played average across the top 17 power forwards is $149K, and Okafor’s $13 million-per-games-played average would be $183 K. The median comparison is David West’s $167K-per-game, still far less than the amount Okafor nixed, and West was an All-Star…in the Western Conference. Comparisons in salary-per-MINUTES-played yield similar results. So far, Okafor and/or his agent look completely foolish for turning down $13 million. Likewise, the Bobcats would be foolish to repeat the same offer in any future negotiations.

Other than PER, what do the more traditional stats tell us about Okafor’s value? Glad I asked! Okafor’s scoring this year is at a career-low (13.1 per game), as are his blocks (1.6 per game). His rebounds, personal fouls, turnovers, and assists are relatively stagnant. Yes, he’s 6th in the league in rebounds and one of just ten players to average a double-double. The average salary among that elite bunch, though? $11.4 million. And for some extra hot sauce, if I were Charlotte’s GM, I’d add that every one of those double-double guys (with the exception of Shawn Marion) is taking his team to the playoffs (and Marion certainly would have had he not sulked his way out of Phoenix). Further, if Okafor’s agent wanted to get all statistical on me, I’d politely direct him to Okafor’s turnover rate—that is, his percentage of possessions that end in a turnover: 13.2%. This is horrifically bad among power forwards—52nd, in fact, below such legends as Brian Cook and Matt Bonner.

Of course, contract negotiations don’t happen in vacuums. As lots of economists love to point out (it’s practically their version of “it is what it is”), a player’s worth is what the market is willing to pay. So is there a team out there with $13 million that they wouldn’t mind flinging at Okafor? If that’s the case, then none of these statistical comparisons mean squat. A quick glance at the League’s payrolls shows a few teams with some obvious financial flexibility, such as Seattle and Memphis. There are also a handful of teams with some wiggle room pending a) the resolution of their own personnel negotiations, and b) how far over the cap they’re willing to go. Miami, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Orlando fall into this group. And a wild card to be worried about (that is, if you actually worry about losing Okafor)? Those dastardly San Antonio Spurs. They’re currently $11.7 million over the cap, but they’ve got Robert Horry ($3.6 mil), Kurt Thomas ($8 mil), Michael Finley ($3.1 mil), Brent Barry ($5.6 mil) and Jacque Vaughn ($1.2 mil) all coming off the books, should they choose not to re-sign. And the allure of San Antonio might allow the Spurs to get a discount in their offering—which they’d just about have to implement, because there’s no way they’re paying Okafor more than Ginobli ($9 mil) and Parker ($10.5 mil).

As for the Bobcats, we’ll have about $10.5 mil in spending money this summer at a minimum (I’m going out on a limb by assuming we’re not going to retain Othella Harrington and Derek Anderson). $10.5 would be a “fair” price to offer Okafor, because it’s right around those averages I laid out earlier. We’ll have potentially more depending on how we handle Sean May ($1.8 mil), Adam Morrison ($3.9 mil), Earl Boykins ($400 K) and the two-headed Ryan Hollins/Jermareo Davidson-combo of raw mediocrity (keep one but not both, right? That’s another half a mil). The two X-factors are trade options (impossible to predict) and the draft. A circa-8th round pick (which is about where we’ll fall) will run us in the neighborhood of $2.5-3 million bones. So we can’t even offer Emeka that “fair” price of $10.5 millon without making some other moves—unless of course we go over the cap, but does anyone actually see that happening?

So there’s my Frontline: Okafor piece. After all that analysis, I must admit that I still don’t know how both sides are going to play it from here on out. This is like the “sports contract” version of the Iraq War: it’s a total mess that was started by a series of blunders, and nobody’s sure about what to do now. First, the Bobcats did a monumentally stupid thing by offering way too much money–$13 million—to Okafor. And then Okafor somehow one-upped their stupidity by actually rejecting the deal. Then he went out and didn’t live up to that value this season, but it’s also going to be hard for management to redact it. There are going to be hard feelings either way—Okafor’s going to be bitter if he takes less, and management’s going to be bitter if he gets away out of spite or they end up forking $13 million over to him—that is, if they can even figure out how. So we’ll see how this quagmire turns out this summer, as well as how each side manages to put a good face on it…

Last night the Charlotte Bobcats defeated the Los Angeles Lakers on their home court 108-95. Jason Richardson lit up the Lakers for 34 points, 10 rebounds, 3 steals and 2 blocks. Matt Carroll helped out with 18 points and Emeka Okafor arose from the dead with 11 points and 11 boards. The icing on the cake was seeing Kobe lose his cool and get kicked out of the game

It was a fun night… unless of course you are a Laker fan.

From the outside looking in, there seems to be something going on this season with the Charlotte Bobcats between Emeka Okafor and short-timer coach Sam Vincent. Also there seems to be friction between Emeka and point guard Raymond Felton. I have to give the Bobcats organization credit, if there is some sort of dysfunction or hostility going on it certainly hasn’t made it into our lazy assed local media.

via BobcatsPlanet member TheBeagle following Tuesday night’s loss to the Utah Jazz.

I think there’s not only a massive disconnect between Mek and “coach,” there’s one between him and his teammates. I never read or hear his name mentioned by his teammates in interviews. Also, at the end of last night’s game, Raymond stands at the end of the bench as the team heads for the tunnel giving 5 to Matt, Jared, Jermareo, and as Mek goes by him, there is no acknowledgement, no eye-contact, nothing; Mek just brushes by Raymond, and keeps walking. Raymond stays for Jermareo and Boykins, I think it was, but that was an odd, awkward moment that was captured on film. If I had to guess, his teammates, most of them at least, are tired of his bullshit.

If anyone has any theories or better yet some concrete information on whats going on in the lockeroom, then comment below or email me.

This is clearly a case where the bloopers are more entertaining than the commercials.

Enjoy!

Charlotte Bobcats commercial bloopers.