At least that would explain the barrage of inaccurate shit-balls this team keeps smearing in the general vicinity of the backboards this year.  Occasionally one will plop into the net, but mostly they splatter every which way, before being hauled in by Kris Humphries, Al Jefferson, and various other non-Bobcats—because the team can’t rebound, either (28^th in rebound rate).  The Bobcats are shooting 41.4% this season, which is not only last in the NBA, it would be last in the National Monkeys Hurling Their Own Feces At Each Other League if there were such a thing (to my knowledge, there isn’t).  In fact, in every conceivable sub-metric of shooting, the Bobcats are soiling the record books.

And that 41.4 percentage is falling fast.  Against, the Nets on Friday, Charlotte couldn’t even crack the 35% barrier.  Worse, we can’t even blame this on Boris Diaw, because his playing status—which was often questionable even when he was on the court—is now official: he’s going to sit until he’s bought out or traded.  This, by the way, is one of the most comical trade demands of all time.  I mean, if a team really wanted a large fat Frenchman, why not just take Gérard Depardieu?  I bet he’d be a lot cheaper and you could probably get free copies of Green Card.  But never mind, my point is, even when Diaw did play, he really only played-ish, taking just 8 shots a game.  Unfortunately, this scatological shooting performance is one of the few things in life that isn’t all Diaw’s fault.  It’s the fault of the 3-headed monster DJ Augustin, Kemba Walker, and Corey Maggette, which collectively shoots 35.3 times per game and collectively makes just 37.7% of them.  Statisticians don’t need a calculator to add all this up, they need a ream of toilet paper.

I think we learned something tonight Sports Fans—the Charlotte Bobcats play better without their coach.

In case you were not watching (don’t even try to lie and say you were; Santa Claus will hear you!), the team was well on its way to another humiliating loss to the Orlando Magic Tuesday night when they were already down by 20 with barely two minutes gone in the second period. Then the craziest thing happened.

Paul Silas got tossed after trying to argue a call (that’s not the crazy part though), and the guys started to play some real good basketball (that’s the crazy part).

They started to make a show of it in the second period when they started to battle back, and even went on a 22-1 run (crazy, I know).

Cory Maggette might finally be living up to the billing he gave himself at the start of the season when he said he was the focal point of the offense with a season high 29 points on the night. As good a his performance was the night belonged to B-mack, Bismack Biyombo. Not only did he do well against Dwight Howard holding him to 15 points and 17 rebounds (that is good against Howard), but he chimed in 10 points of his own to go with 15 rebounds and seven blocks.

I’m starting to see why this guy was so eager to get over here and start playing ball.

I think Jerry Maguire said it best in the pivotal scene at the end of the 1996 movie when he said:

“We live in a cynical world. A cynical world. And we work in a business of tough competitors. I love you. You… complete me. “

Unlike Dorothy, the Bobcats do not have us at hello anymore (nor do they complete me).

I get more and more of a feeling that if I am going to look for a silver lining with these guys I’m going to have to turn into a cynical little blogger that has to be sarcastic and poke fun at the team’s failures in order to find something I can claim is positive to write about.

Then the guys give us a game like they did Sunday night against the New Jersey Nets. Now I am fully aware that the Nets are not exactly challenging, but for the Bobcats to have been competitive, and actually lead—for a moment I thought they were really playing good basketball.

Of course that Deron Williams guy had to screw everything up with his franchise record 57 points (darn him). Then again, Deron Williams is an elite player and was on the court with a bunch of guys that are far from elite. He should have been able to do something like that.

Yuck.  After Wednesday night, I can honestly say that the only thing worse than the lockout has been the actual season.  The Bobcats were flayed by the Pistons—mostly due to Greg Monroe, who had a trillion rebounds, 750 billion of which were offensive.  Games against teams like Detroit are probably the most wretched of all, because I don’t think there’s a big talent gap between them and us.  After two games, though, they’ve beaten us by a combined 32 points.  Moreover, from top-to-bottom they’ve shown far more skill and energy (even Charlie Villanueva’s 5-year/$35M contract outperforms Tyrus Thomas’s 5-year/$40M deal).

But the centerpiece has been Monroe.  I really love watching Monroe play.  In fact, he’s #3 on my All-Monroe list, ahead of Marilyn and behind only our 5^th President (who’s underrated, by the way—how many Presidents have an era associated with them that’s known as the “Era of Good Feelings”?  Anyone think this current era is going to be called anything close to that?), and Monroe from Too Close For Comfort, who pioneered the way for wacky, quasi-gay sit-com neighbors.  But still, there’s no excuse for what happened on Wednesday, in which Monroe’s 8 offensive rebounds (part of 18 total for Detroit) gave the Pistons more second chances than Chris Brown.  The Bobcats tried to hide behind the excuse that Bismack Biyombo’s injury took away their interior presence, but that conveniently ignores the fact that Monroe already had 4 boards in the 9 minutes that Biyombo did play.

When your team sits at the absolute bottom of the league with a dismal 4-28 record the idea of looking forward to anything other than the end of the season (No 1) seems a little crazy. However, as someone who likes to at least try to find the silver lining in a season better compared to pyrite than an actual precious metal, I do believe we have a few things to look forward to:

The No 2 thing that we get to look forward to is a something that the team has done little of so far this season; we get to start the second half with everyone healthy! Woo hoo!

That brings me to No 3: Our next win will come against the Detroit Pistons on Leap Day, February 29. The Pistons rank towards the bottom of most significant statistical categories too. Part of the blame for the Bobcats ranking so low can be not having many of the starters during the season, but since they are all actually expected to be healthy and suit up on Wednesday I’m predicting a win.

I thought I’d use this All Star Break as a nice chance to gasp for air in this waterboarding session of a season and not write at all about the Bobcats for a weekend.  I didn’t feel like examining this team’s first 30-odd games of the year anymore than I feel like examining my own rectum.  But I was inspired by Gregg Easterbrook of all people.  For those of you lucky enough to have not stumbled on him, Easterbrook spews forth his recurring “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” column on ESPN during the NFL season, in which he peppers his pathological hatred for large football-centric colleges and drafted football players amongst random outer-space factoids and ponderous, in-depth critiques of terrible sci-fi shows that nobody likes in the first place.  He also loves to theorize, and does so with arrogant certainty—which is funny, because one of his go-to theories is that a team or a coach failed because they “angered the football gods.”  Probably the only reason I keep reading his columns is that he fills me with that sense of shame and disgust that I can’t get anywhere else during the Bobcats offseason.

Anyway, I was looking over one of the TMQ’s Easterbrook shat out towards the end of this NFL season, and it featured one of his typical pseudo-lectures, this one being on why football has become such a hit on television.  Here were his five reasons:

• Football is America’s most popular sport
• Football is a great DVR sport
• Football is live
• Women are acquiring more social and economic power
• Only men can understand flat-screen HD TV remotes