The Charlotte Bobcats have fired their rookie head coach, Mike Dunlap after only one season.  He came in out of nowhere (St. John’s assistant), said the right things, started hot (7-5), didn’t freak out when things went bad, tripled the win total from the previous season and got fired.

I’m not crying over this.  I don’t completely get it but I’m sort of ok with it.  Not knowing details and honestly, completely spit-balling here, I sort of could see how a one-and-done hire worked for Dunlap.  He never really, truly impressed me as a coach.  I’m not really the one he was aiming to impress, Michael Jordan, Rich Cho and Rod Higgins were, but he never made me think “Wow, this guy has his stuff together and knows where this team is going.”

Dunlap was charged with player development.  I believe he was a place-marker  but a good one, from the beginning.  He wasn’t going to lead this team, in 3 years to the Playoffs.  Coach Dunlap was here to take younger players and give them tools that would lead to success down the road.  He did that and to me, that’s a huge reason to be upset with this firing.  He did what was expected and asked of him, and still lost his job at the end of one crappy season.

Tonight, I forgot there was a game.  Apparently, so did the Charlotte Bobcats.  That’s a bad joke thousands of people make all the time.  I often make it.  My dear sweet, long suffering mother often asks, “Are the Bobcats playing tonight?”  I respond with the incredibly ingenius “Well, they were scheduled to, but they forgot the playing part,” or something along those lines.

I tuned to the game with about 3 minutes left, thinking “Oh good, it’s Sacramento, they’re in big trouble,” and was quickly stunned to see 76-117.  Sacramento gets a lot of attention lately, mostly for being rudderless and lost, whether they’ll be sold and then moved, sold and stay, or just suck forever.  They’re playing in a no-name arena in front of a few people.  Hell, they made a trade just before the deadline, trading the #5 overall pick, Thomas Robinson to Houston in basically a salary dump.  There have only been maybe 6 top 5 picks traded in their rookie year, so this is truly historic rolling over.  Still, they put up 119 points against the Bobcats.

I was almost certain this year wouldn’t be like last year but the last few games have proved me wrong.  98-68 loss at the Jazz.  106-84 to the Clippers.  Coach Mike Dunlap is saying things like “This one just scooted away from us,”  ”Trying to stay upbeat, we have a game tomorrow and it’s all about playing with energy…team basketball.”  C’mon man, let’s get serious here.

The NBA is more concerned with growing world wide and teams like the Charlotte Bobcats, while important to their individual markets, are simply inventory to spread the game globally, not necessarily to dominate a particular market.

Basically, It doesn’t matter where the team plays to the upper levels of the NBA. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, maybe but the rest, it doesn’t matter where they are. As long as a city can put up an arena, somewhat sustain a bit of TV or local business revenue, the league will use whoever and wherever to stock its shelves with content to send out into the world.

It used to be there was a building in a town that hosted the circus, a couple car shows, maybe wrestling a couple times a year and the main tenant would be a basketball team. They sold tickets and kept the lights on to support this local building. It evolved into it’s own beast, certainly under David Stern where places that never had a major league team of any kind, suddenly had Michael Jordan visiting 4 times a year.

Last night, late in the 105-92 loss to the defending champion Miami Heat, the defending worst win % ever Charlotte Bobcats had a chance.  A puncher’s chance, but a chance to beat Miami, late in the game; that’s really saying something.  The pivotal moment, in my estimation came with about 8:15 left in the fourth quarter.  Just watch the video:

I’m probably reading far too deep into this, but there are so many layers to this; it’s symptomatic of so much going on with the Bobcats, the Heat, the league in general but seriously, it’s a moment in time when a dude who is 3 weeks short of his 31st birthday kicked another dude in the nuts.  I’ll say it for googlers and those who refuse to click videos:  Dwyane Wade kicked Ramon Sessions in the nuts.  Two time champ, Finals MVP, 8 time All-Star, Dwyane Wade kicked 5th year pro-basketball player Ramon Sessions in the nuts.  A grown man, professional, a dude who wrote a book on fatherhood, kicked another man in the nuts on tv.

I can’t get over the fact it actually happened, let alone extrapolate my points about what it means or how it’s an analogy to the Bobcats season or the NBA officiating issues.  The best part of the whole thing is that after the scuffle, Dwyane Wade was the one shooting free throws.  That’s the equivalent to some Seinfeld episode where George gets hit going for a parking space, and the other guy gets the spot and wrecks George’s car.  It’s just something that doesn’t make sense on a sit-com let alone in an NBA game.

I don’t know.  I’ll be the first to tell you, I don’t know.  Whether the Bobcats are good, bad, lucky, suckering teams, winning close ones early in the year only to lose them later, a fluke or on to something real and sustainable.  I don’t know.  All those adjectives or suspicions have definite truths to them.  That’s easy to say though.  Like I’m standing up on the street corner saying “God exists!  Maybe!  Repent!  Or do whatever you want!  He’s coming soon!  Or he’s not coming at all!  Maybe he’s coming later!”  Nothing too bold about saying “I don’t know.”

Just the not knowing, this year is a big deal though.  Last year the team was awful.  The whole way around, we know that.  So, just thinking “Hey, this is great!” is an incredible feeling.  My mind is still of the pre-OKC beatdown however.  Those were the Bobcats I expected to see.  Not the ones who beat Dallas for the first time and were 7-5 until that horrible, worst ever loss to the Thunder.  Actually, I can say now, I didn’t know what to expect.

New coach, new players, new jerseys, new floor, new year.  I was hoping for 20 wins.  Seriously, that was around what I really thought was possible.  Being a third of the way there, less than a seventh of the way through the season was very surprising but when you see how it was done, it’s somewhat comforting.

Shocking the NBA by having a winning record early in the year isn’t the trick.  The trick is sustaining that progress, that evidences itself in wins, throughout the full 82 game slate and on into the future.  I’m realizing that after every statement about the Bobcats you can and should read into it “after the single worst season in NBA history, based on winning percentages.”  That cloud hangs still, and it casts a shadow, but far from an all encompassing one.