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.

My goal is to always remain optimistic without being completely unrealistic when I write my posts, but I have to say that the Charlotte Bobcats are making it awful hard to do that these days.

The scene from White Men Can’t Jump where Wesley Snipes is getting hustled by Woody Harrelson keeps coming to mind when I think of this team. I picture Wesley in a Bobcats uniform with his hand in the air going, “It’s pretty! It’s so pretty!”

Then Rosie Perez stands up and yells out (in her best Puerto Rican accent), “Oh no it ain’t! Go pay your taxes!”

For those of you that do watch the Bobcats I am sure I don’t need to tell you how bad things have been. I think the game Wednesday night against the Portland Trailblazers should be treated like Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter series; it will be “the game that will not be named.”

We knew that this season would be a tough one, but this is starting to hurt to watch; 3-20 and in the midst of an 11 game losing streak following Saturday’s game with the Phoenix Suns. When will the pain end? When will these guys win another game?

Before we figure out the best chance for that let’s take a look at what these guys are capable of and how they stack up to the rest of the league:

I had concerns about this Bobcat team from the first day of the season. When you see that an NBA team only has two legitimate starters on the roster, and one of those two players  is traded during the season, you have the makings of a frustrating campaign. Gerald Wallace was traded; and the other valid NBA starter, Stephen Jackson, has been hampered with a hamstring injury for weeks. Boris Diaw, the ‘Cats starting power forward, shows up to play when he “feels” like it. Center Kwame Brown has shown solid games but still lacks consistancy. DJ Augustine has not proven himself, at least to me, to be a starting NBA point guard but more of a sixth-man back-up type NBA player. The result of this rather motley crew are home losses to other bad teams like the Pistons.

I wonder if Larry Brown watched the game?  If he did I would love to know what his thoughts were when he saw these very un-Larry Brownish things occurring on the court last night.

• Gerald Henderson being used in the starting lineup and playing 28 minutes.
• DJ Augustin taking long jumpers early in the shot clock
• Matt Carroll playing meaningful minutes
• Dominic McGuire getting a DNP-CD
• Gana Diop taking and making jumpshots!!!

From the opening moments of the game you could see a stark stylistic difference between the Brown Bobcats and the Silas Bobcats. The players looked much more relaxed, they were hustling and their body language was significantly improved.

Lets see if this sounds familiar to you.  The Bobcats fall down early by double digits to [insert opposing team name], Fight there way back into the game late in game behind hot shooting by [insert player name here] only to fall flat and fail in the closing minutes. I know that Larry Brown teams usually start the season slow, but this game (especially the 1st quarter) had a real Vincent-ish look to it. See for yourself.

Lets not kid ourselves, The primary goal of this game against the Pistons ( as it should have been ) was to get guys some rest and most importantly to not get anybody hurt.  Even though rookie Derrick Brown looked like he was purposely attempting dislocate his spinal column performing a Travolta-esque dance move ( see the 12 second mark of the video ), the Bobcats managed to get out of this game healthy and with a win.

Raymond Felton sat out tonight with flu-like symptoms. DJ Augustin filled in nicely with 13 points, 9 assists and 2 steals, and get this 1 blocked shot. Larry Hughes took advantage of the extra minutes that usually would have gone to Jackson to produce 18 points, 5 assists, 4 rebounds and 2 steals on 6-10 from the field and 4-6 from three point range.  As has been the case recently, the Bobcats gave up another sizeable lead in the 4th quarter but managed to hang on to get the win keeping alive the mathematical possibility that they could slide up into the 6th seed if they can win their last 3 games and the Miami Heat go no better than 1-2. Stranger things have happened.

The Good

• DJ Augustin was solid in the starting role even hitting the go ahead jumper in the final minute of the 4th.
• Larry Hughes had a good shooting game. I’d rather see Graham get those minutes, but if LB is more comfortable with Hughes then ILBIT.
• Crash and Jax got some rest. Crash played 33 minutes and Jax only had 27

The Bad

• Did I mention that Pee-Wee Herman dance move that Derrick Brown tried to execute?

The Ugly

• The Pistons. It’s sad to see an organization that was so dominant in the East for so long drop as far as they have.