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.

Michael Jordan is the owner of the Charlotte Bobcats.  Now that I’ve said that, I think the following has a place on this site.  In all honesty, this is the deep dark off season.  I Google-News the Bobcats every couple days or so, I check twitter of course, and there’s nothing going on.  I decided to check ESPN.com, knowing they sometimes link to stories on the team-page that I might not come across otherwise.  Sure enough, they had a story there, that I would have likely never read or come across.

There are a couple headlines:  ”Granderson: Michael Jordan’s Obama fundraiser 22 years after Harvey Gantt,”  and “The political Michael Jordan.”  The article is by LZ Granderson, who I’ve never heard of and don’t know anything about.  At first glance I thought it was Liz Granderson but it’s not, it’s LZ, a man and a black man at that, from what I can tell.  I consider myself post-racial, so I can point things like that out.  Read the article, it’s semi-interesting in an off-season desperation sort of way.

Right now, the only Bobcats news you’re going to get is related to the DNC at the arena or this little story about Michael Jordan hosting a fundraiser for President Barack Obama.  Actually, if you have the auto-play enabled on ESPN.com you’ll see a little debate on whatever that show where they have the old guy take the wrong side of an argument over and over, stating that David Stern and Jordan are both involved in the Obama re-election fund. 

Can a full changeover in culture come to the team who put up the worst winning percentage in NBA history?  One season removed, will things just get gradually better or is there a sea change coming?

I wonder who the first guy to say “Oh, we are bringing in a culture change.”  Or “What we really need to do is completely change the culture.”  It must have been a new coach somewhere who came in and he was asked “Well coach, what do you bring to the team.”  It’s a great way of saying “Everything you didn’t have before.”

If you think about it, it’s a really great way to put how big of a change you want to make.  The key word there of course is “want” because cultures aren’t things that are moved or just changed.  They are built and influenced and steered but never just changed.  If you think about cultures in general, you think of nations or ethnicities but cultures are so diverse you might say that families or even individuals have cultures all to their own.

Father and Son

The Panthers have training camp in full swing, and we’re sort of covering it over at PanthersPlanet.com, but training camp doesn’t lead to many stories, other than that whole Jeff Otah deal.  Well the Bobcats have training camp coming up too, which will be less hurried and lockouty this year.  The only interesting thing so far is that Scoop Jardine from Syracuse is going to be invited.

Scoop Jardine isn’t really the story.  The roster is at 13 and the other two spots aren’t likely to be filled by a combo guard coming off a broken foot that was unlikely to be drafted anyway.  Scoop Jardine is likely invited, according to PhillySportsLive.com, because of who he’s friends with.  That’s the issue I have, the blogger is pointing to a photo of Jardine with Michael Jordan’s daughter from Facebook, which might be a stretch but it leads me to a larger problem with the Bobcats:  Nepotism.

I know I’m beating a dead horse here.  I think I’ve hit on this every time an assistant is hired, a front office spot is filled or a low-level roster spot is filled.  It just keeps coming up.  You don’t see the Knicks, Nets, Heat, Thunder or Lakers doing this.  Actually, I doubt the Wizards, Hornets, Clippers or Magic do either.  It’s just so obvious and needless.

Yeah, we're exasperated too!

The Charlotte Bobcats are churning.  Like, if you’ve ever made a salad all in one bowl, starting with the dressing, churning it up from the bottom, that’s the kind of turning over the Bobcats are currently engaged in.  It makes me, as a fan entrenched in my own obsessions and what I think the team should look like, almost nostalgic for the past.

D.J. Augustin and his weirdo “inside source”  are now gone, from the team and from our message boards.  Corey Maggette, the latest line in a long line of middling “stars,” gone in favor of a much younger Ben Gordon and a draft pick.  Paul Silas, not retained, a new coach that no one had heard of is now the much ballyhooed head coach that every fan hopes will turn things around.