When I read the news that the Charlotte Bobcats had bought out the contract of Boris Diaw I couldn’t help but think that it was about darn time.

All season long we’ve been reading about a guy that plays hard when he wants to; he slacks off; he’s talented; he can’t focus. Aargh! It was like reading a list of reasons why the really dumb kid in class was smarter than the valedictorian!

What always got me was the way that Paul Silas just seemed to accept it. Now some of you might think ‘what else is he going to do?’ The answer to that is easy—for quality coaches. You either get the best out of someone or you bench his sorry behind. Yes, you do have to sometimes have to temper your style to fit the player, but Diaw was not coach-able.

The guy needed to get cut some time ago. There has been little to cheer about in Charlotte this year, but losing is no excuse for the lack of effort that this guy often exhibited. He wanted to be elsewhere? So what. He didn’t like losing? No one does.

When you’re being handed the gift of all gifts, the chance to play a game and get paid ridiculously well for it, you should be happy to be on any team. You don’t get to pick and choose who you get to play with or where all the time.

I’m not a fan of Paul Silas, but I like the way he handled being asked about Diaw leaving:

“I’m not going to say anything about that. We have to go straight up with who we have and we wish him well.”

In a whipsaw three-day period, the Bobcats got a taste of arguably the NBA’s best and worst teams.  The results were predictable: against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the Bobcats had fewer answers than a Sarah Palin interview and were blown out in a disaster that left fans drooling and cross-eyed.  Then against the Hornets on Monday, the Bobcats won by failing less than their even more wretched opponents (they also did the impossible by making me pity somebody else’s team).

The Thunder are (is?) the class of the league, in my opinion.  Analyzing why the Bobcats lost to them is like understanding why a meth addict gets burned when he sticks his face in a blowtorch.  The Bobcats were completely overpowered.  In fact, I don’t think a single member of the Bobcats could start for this team, unless MAYBE you take Gerald Henderson over Daequon Cook.  But then again, the only reason Cook starts is so that super-sub James Harden can come in off the bench and do things like score 33 points in 16 shots while your team tries to cover him with everyone from Kemba Walker to DJ Brown to oil slick to smoke screen.  Harden is not only an easy 6^th man of the year, he also tops my list of Players with Names That Sound Like Past Presidents:

1. James Harden
2. Roger Mason
3. Richard Hamilton
4. Stephen Jackson
5. Richard Jefferson

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.

Mad Magazine used to have a section called “Headlines We Bet You’ll Never See” (example: “UN Solves Crisis”), and that was the first thing I thought of when I saw that the AP recap of the Bobcats-Magic game was titled, “Corey Maggette, Bismack Biyombo Rally Bobcats Past Magic.”  I have to admit that I was not smelling an upset going into this game; what I was smelling was more like a wet fart in a crowded, dank elevator after Deron Williams morphed into Gandhi 2 on Sunday, became a one-man wrecking crew, and dropped 57 on us.  Instead, I was treated to a delightful romp of 47% shooting, a 20-point comeback, and best of all, no Boris Diaw!  Pinch me!  The only way it could have been better would be if instead of sitting on the bench, Diaw was shown sitting on his Segway, and afterward the camera followed him solemnly motoring out of the tunnel.

But back to that Nets game real quick, because in its own way, it was fascinating.  First, Williams was an omnipresent rampaging maniac on a scoring spree.  Second, Paul Silas elected to defend Williams with only DJ Augustin or Kemba Walker in single coverage for virtually the entire game.  The result allowed fans a chance to see how a basketball game featuring Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee against 100 Agent Smith clones might look.  Williams would grab a rebound and pass to Williams, who would either kick it out to Williams for a 3-pointer or drive to the hoop himself and draw the foul, always with either Augustin or Walker nipping helplessly at his heels.  Silas not only defended this “strategy,” he gave himself props for it.  “I thought that’s mainly what kept us in the game,” he said afterward.  Disregard Silas’s dirt-off-my-shoulders comments.  In fact, I’m starting to wonder if Silas is one of those people who don’t vaccinate their children because they were told not to by Jenny McCarthy.

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

Like a recurring nightmare, the Bobcats and Wizards played again on Saturday night.  My first impression was astonishment at what a large, lively crowd was on hand in Charlotte.  Who were all of these self-flagellators, and is there a Guinness Book of World Records category for “Most Masochists in a Single Room”? At least they were semi-rewarded with Kemba Walker’s first triple-double, Boris Diaw’s biweekly check-in from the planet Neptune, and an outcome that was a clear improvement on the four prior games.  But it was still a loss, and one that makes the Bobcats officially the worst team in the league.

Besides the obvious culprits—three disastrous possessions in the last minute of play and 12 missed free throws—I want to draw your attention to a particularly vomitous sequence late in the second quarter.  The Wizards were up by 3 with Jan Vesely on the line.  Vesely misses the free throw, but the Wizards get the offensive board and score.  Then John Wall steals it from Diaw, leading to a Wizards dunk.  Then Tyrus Thomas attempts a pass to a lucky fan sitting courtside, and it’s Wizards ball and they score.   Then Diaw, as if annoyed at being shown up by Thomas, throws a pinpoint pass directly to Vesely—Jake Delhomme couldn’t have done it better himself.  The Wizards didn’t score on this one, because they managed a dreadful pass of their own that was stolen by Walker, who—wait for it—makes his own terrible pass back to Vesely.  But wait, Vesely gives it to Nick Young, who promptly passes it right out of bounds (I swear I’m not making this up).  Thomas then simply misses an 18-footer (which at this point actually counts as progress), leading to a Wall travel, leading finally to a…Walker turnover.  The two teams combined for 8 turnovers in 84 seconds, 4 in a row by the Bobcats.  What had been a 1-point Wizards lead was now a 9-point lead in less than two minutes.  What had been the Time Warner Cable Arena should now be called the Jonestown Arena.