My top 5 most disturbing images

5. Demonic Monkey

4.  Hawk Dog

3. This pimp decked out in green. Doesn’t this pimp realize that all of the truly  pimpalicious pimptastic pimps are wearing turquoise this year?

2. this goth kid.  Why didn’t his Mom enroll this kid into military school? Pushups at 5:00am would have done this clown some good.

1. The image thats burned into my brain from the  Bobcats’ 31 point loss to the 76ers. In this game, our "uptempo" offense  managed only 63 points, while shooting a paltry 30.7% from the field. Our starters had a total of 29 points. … That was not a typo. This was one of the most horrid basketball performances that I’ve ever seen at the professional level, and I would just like to forget that it ever happened.

Whether or not there is true cause for optimism with this Charlotte Bobcats team could be largely decided right away this season.

After an off-season of improvements across the board in the Eastern Conference, there is plenty of uncertainty as to how this season will shake out.  For the ‘Cats, said improvements occurred largely internally.  While the addition of Jason Richardson will provide immediate scoring help and a veteran presence, it is the re-signing of Gerald Wallace and the worth of an added year of experience for youngsters Ray Felton, Emeka Okafor and Walter Herrmann that should be the biggest deal-breakers for this team.

With nine of their first fourteen games coming at home, November success will be absolutely crucial in order for the ‘Cats to begin to turn the corner toward being competitive in the East this season.  Further, the team plays another nine of fifteen at home in December.  In order to stand a chance with a back-loaded road schedule, the Bobcats must perform to start this season.

But before December can even become an issue, November must be taken care of first. 

The reasonable goal, you ask?  Seven up, seven down for a .500 opening month.  Let’s break it down.

There are five opponents on the schedule that should clearly be out of Charlotte’s league, at least at present: Phoenix (home), Houston (home), Washington (home), Orlando (road), and Boston (home).  Unless the ‘Cats go from 33-49 doormats to championship contenders in the blink of an eye, it isn’t fair to expect them to win any of these games.  While any game on the NBA regular season’s schedule is certainly winnable, the objective prognosticator would have to consider these games likely losses.  Phoenix, Houston and Boston all figure to be title contenders, while the Magic and Wiz are expected to duke it out for the Southeast Division crown when all is said and done.  So chalk up five losses, four of which will come at home.

That leaves nine at least somewhat reasonably winnable games in November.  However, part of the way a team goes for 18, 26 and 33 wins in its three seasons of existence is by managing to not win every single reasonably winnable game.  The ‘Cats need to take steps forward this season, but the fact of the matter is that these steps are likely to be baby steps.  So asking them to win each of the nine remaining games is a bit much.

Asking them to win seven isn’t.

Milwaukee (home), Philadelphia (road), Indiana (home), Seattle (home) and Portland (home) are all teams that are perceived to be at or below the Bobcats’ level.  Four of the games are at home, giving the ‘Cats a distinct edge, particularly against the cross-country travelers from Seattle and Portland.  Philadelphia projects to be one of the three worst teams in the league.  If the ‘Cats are going to establish themselves as on the rise, they must win these games.

That brings the record to 5-5, leaving just three games with Miami and one at Atlanta to decide the month.  The ‘Cats travel to Miami twice in the first month and go to Atlanta the night after the home game against Miami.  Although likely more talented than Charlotte, the Heat will be markedly weakened throughout the season’s first month (and possibly more) by the temporary loss of Dwyane Wade, making it enormously possible that the Bobcats will be able to take two games from them early on (the home game and one of two on the road). 

On the other hand, the Hawks are a very similar team to these Charlotte boys.  Their roster is full of young and immensely talented players who are still learning to transform raw skills into cohesive team output.  Going to their place the night after a home game against Miami makes the Hawks a tougher opponent than usual, however, and a win there cannot be taken for granted.

There is clearly a lot of wiggle room here.  Sure, the ‘Cats could beat Atlanta, but they could just as easily lose two of three to Miami instead of winning two of three.  Or maybe they could surprise a Wizards’ team that is superior in talent but occasionally lacking in focus.  Or they could drop one to an Indiana team that could be better than some of us expect them to be.

But the bar is set: 7-7 will set the tone for this team to keep moving forward in the months to come.  Anything less would be a disappointment.  Not a long-term deal breaker, but a setback no less.

Less than 24 hours now, we’ll begin to find out if they can do it.

Sorry I didn’t get a chance to comment on Friday night’s game against the Sixers. I’m in a Forecasting class at school right now and I was working on an insanely difficult assignment–the handout for the project itself was 9 pages of single-spaced, 10-font instructions. I took this class ostensibly to help me predict things like market share but secretly to help me pick football games (in the final project we have to take a series of data sets—of our choosing—and use software to help us make predictions—hmmm, wonder what topic I’ll pick there). So anyway, because I was overburdened with work and because the Bobcats played back-to-back games (and because both games were really depressing in their own way) I just decided to combine the recaps into one.

If you were looking for a good game Friday night…then I hope you flipped over to the NCAA Tournament, because the 76ers-Bobcats game was awful. Charlotte was run over by a Philly team that was playing without Andre Iguodala, their only legitimately good player. The other Andre—Miller, that is—had 19 points, 9 assists, 6 rebounds, and was impossible to contain despite the fact that he’s slower than a 3-legged dog. Steamin’ Willie Green had 18 points and 6 boards, Stephen Hunter had 18 and 9 and made every single shot he took—he shot more accurately than Rick Hunter. Lord, must I go on? Are you getting the picture? It was horrible.

For the first time, I started to liken following the Bobcats to some sort of experiment to see how much I can take. I’m beginning to feel like the guy in Supersize Me!, only instead of bad food, I’m trying to show what watching months of bad basketball will do to you. And to make things worse, lately commentators Matt Devlin and Henry Williams come back from every commercial break holding up some sort of cheap promotional merchandise you can buy (usually made by some company/guy called “Crazy Fred”) and there’s even a "ShopBobcats.com" graphic that blinks on and off, QVC-style.

And have you noticed how many shady financial/insurance companies we’re in bed with now? We’ve got Geico, which has gotten so huge they now have 2 mascots, the gecko and the cavemen (wasn’t that a crappy 80s/90s band that a bunch of early indie prototypes insisted rocked? No wait, I’m thinking of Echo and the Bunnymen–sorry), State Farm (“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there…except when your entire neighborhood floods in a massive human tragedy, because we sure as hell aren’t going to cover that sort of thing—try the Red Cross”), Lending Tree (“When banks compete, they end up making some terrible subprime loans”), and on and on.

Anyway, the best thing about the Philly game was that it ended. On Saturday, Raymond Felton and Gerald Wallace were out with injuries that were basically just exhaustion-related. "We need to make sure the guys get two days off. The bodies just need to recover,'' Coach Bickerstaff said, sounding like Lindsey Lohan’s publicist every time she checks into rehab. This meant that we started a somewhat ridiculous lineup of Brevin Knight, Matt Carroll, Walter Herrmann, Adam Morrison, and Jake Voskuhl. That’s right, we were one Steve Blake-for-Brevin Knight trade away from a Bill Simmons “Whitewash.”

Devlin did me a tremendous personal favor early on by clearing up the whole Herrmann pronunciation controversy. Apparently, “they” came to Devlin and Williams and said that Walter’s surname is in fact pronounced like plain old “Herman.” So I’m just glad to put it behind me, and I take back everything I said about the Cleveland announce team (actually, just this part).  Now if some sort of authority would just do this with Mehmet Okur’s first name, maybe by circulating a “Mehmet memo” Ha!! Don’t forget to tip your waitresses…

Speaking of Walter, he had another 17 against Philly and put up 20 and 6 against New Jersey and is playing pretty darned well (and have you seen how focused he is when he runs? He reminds me of the Terminator 2 bad guy). It’s kind of funny seeing stuff I wrote about him months ago now cropping up in national publications (e.g., the Fabio comparisons, “Herrmann Monster,” etc.). Just remember: I was making fun of Walter before it was cool.

The other bright spot of the past few games has been Alan Anderson, who had another 12 points against NJ and was a real presence in the lane. I’m starting to think a good coaching technique would be to make rookies and young players watch video footage of D-League guys doing things like staying in Super 8 Motels and taking 15-hour bus rides from Tulsa to Sioux Falls; it’d be like a "Scared Straight" program that would hopefully motivate them to try harder. Anderson is clearly playing as if he’s terrified at the thought of having to go back and play for someone like the Dakota Wizards.

As it happens, the Bobcats welcomed back Vince Carter (Ha! I'll be at Jake's Comedy Club on Friday…) to NC and very nearly pulled out an upset over the Nets. It took a last second, improvised alley-oop by Carter off a desperate Jason Kidd airball just to tie it and send it into OT. In the extra frame, VC took over with 10 points and the Bobcats ran out of gas, diesel, solar power, alternative energy sources, slave galleys, or whatever they were miraculously running on in the first place to keep it so close. Carroll had 27, Voskuhl had 14, Knight had 15 and 8. It’s sad, really, because we’re taking on the Hawks and the Bucks next, we just had Philly…the schedule really favored us at the end, it’s just too bad we didn’t have enough guys to make it happen—makes me want to break into Tiffany’s “Could’ve Been”…

After the game, by the way, when reporters asked VC about his upcoming free agency this summer, he said, “As of right now, I'm a Net. I'll always be a Net, so we'll just go from there when it's time.” When Carter speaks, you can almost see the fine print—maybe State Farm is an appropriate NBA sponsor after all…

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Who says the Bobcats and the 76ers are among the worst teams in the league? I do, after watching last night’s fiasco between them. In general, it was an atrocity of a game, almost like a Suck Relay Race: each team took a Suck Lap then passed the Suck Baton off to the other. The Bobcats ran the first leg of the Suck-a-thon by playing a horrendous 1st quarter that saw them trail by as many as 17 points. Then it was Philly’s turn to suck, as we cut the deficit to 6. Then it was our turn again, as we fell behind 20, and so on and so forth until the Tour de Suck finally ended with a 9-point loss to a team that’s so bad, it’s already locked up 3 first round draft picks. It was a Suck-fest. It was Suck-stock.

Geez, did Coach Bickerstaff force the team to put on adult diapers and drive the whole way up to Philly non-stop? He must have—how else do you explain why they played that badly? It’s hard even describing how bad we were—it’s like trying to describe the size of the universe; Carl Sagan would have difficulty describing how bad we sucked. The statistics don’t bear it out either. Sure, I could say that the team only shot 27% from the field in the first quarter (eventually climbing “all the way” to 44%), but they’ve done worse than that before (in fact, they probably did it last game), so I don’t know. The team was just bad. They were voo-doo bad, like someone was sticking pins in little dolls of Adam Morrison and Raymond Felton, causing them to combine for 8 turnovers. Who was this master of puppets, pulling our strings? I don't know, but has anyone seen Adrian Branch lately?

More disturbingly, we seemed to abandon all efforts to win. Gerald Wallace and Emeka Okafor only played about 30 minutes—what, are we saving them for the playoffs or something? In the fourth quarter, with the game still pathetically winnable, we tried coming back with Melvin Ely, Walter Herrmann, and Primoz Brezec all on the floor at the same time—MC Hammer has a better chance of coming back than that group. The benign explanation is that the team was being punished. The more cynical explanation, however, is that at halftime we officially threw our hats into the Greg Oden/Kevin Durant Sweepstakes.

I don’t know about you, but I sure hope not. I know, I know, this year’s draft picks are Can’t Miss. The only small problem with that theory, though, is that it’s completely insane. First of all, they’re not “Can’t Miss,” they’re “Quite Easily Missed,” because there’s no guarantee that you get them—it’s called a Draft Lottery for a reason. Second, they can completely flame out, and instead of being the Next Michael Jordan, they become the next Michael Olowokandi. Third, even if either of them becomes the Next LeBron James, how exactly has that worked out for Cleveland? Four years later, and the most the Cavs have to show for their '02-03 tank job is the 2nd round of the playoffs of a lousy conference.

I’m sure I’m just being paranoid. Coach Bickerstaff would never tank a game, and things aren’t that bad. Actually, look what happened after we lost to the Bucks a few weeks back: if that game wasn’t a signal to hang it up for the season, I don’t know what is, and we played some of our best ball ever after that debacle. And we haven’t been all that disappointing either. In fact, John Hollinger at ESPN.com produced a Top 15 Most Disappointing List for this year, and not a single Bobcat is on it—on the other hand, I question the validity of any “Most Disappointing” list that only features one LA Clipper…

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At long last we got to play the woeful 76ers Sunday night, a team that was down and ripe for the kicking. With the football Eagles playing at about the same time, this game was probably viewed by about 200 people in Philadelphia (an estimated three of whom don’t actually work for the 76ers). Sixers coach Mo Cheeks has got to be presiding over one of the worst situations in the League right now, as his team has no go-to players at all; I can only imagine his pep talks: “Kevin Ollie, we need more from you!”, “Willie Green, you’re just not getting it done!”, “I’m looking for you to lead this team, Samuel Dalembert!” And if and when they ever do get done rebuilding, VP Larry Brown will almost certainly “pull a Riley” on Mo, down to and including leaving the next year for surgery. I’m quite possibly either the 1st or the 1,001st person to draw this parallel, but I find Cheeks’ situation comparable to Alan Trammell’s with the Detroit Tigers a few years back: 80s hero returns to manage terrible team, fails.

As for the game itself, commentator Henry Williams had the line of the night with about eight minutes to go in the fourth quarter. “If there is one mistake the Bobcats have made tonight,” Henry said, “it’s…” And I don’t know what he said after that, because I was laughing too hysterically to hear him finish. This is because the Bobcats didn’t make just one mistake last night. In fact, chances are they didn’t just make one mistake on whatever play Henry was describing. The Bobcats littered the game with mistakes, and some of them were downright creative. The stand out mistake was Jeff McInnis getting ejected in the first quarter because—get this—he wasn’t listed on the active roster!! Boy, we sure know how to make a newcomer feel wanted, don’t we? Yep, we somehow miscounted poor Jeff, the Sixers caught it (and props to whoever on their bench noticed it—is that what they’ve got Shavlik Randolph doing these days?), and he was ordered to leave the game. I’m not sure if Jeff then went back to his mansion and foiled a burglary by two bumbling robbers in a series of slapstick hijinks, but they ought to call this the “Home Alone Clause.” It’s just a darn good thing a) it happened late in the game, b) we weren’t playing back-to-backs, and c) we’ve got all those extra guards…

So that was the winner for Lead Mistake, and it was great, but it couldn’t have done it without an excellent supporting cast. Fast-forward to the fourth quarter, when we built an 11-point lead (mostly by virtue of missing much less than Philly): Kyle Korver and his knee-high black socks (Korver apparently takes his fashion hints by old men in Bermuda shorts) hits a three-pointer, Emeka Okafor commits an offensive foul, Korver makes two free throws, Bobcats turnover, Andrei Iguodala slams it, Sixers defensive rebound, Iguodala makes one free throw, Adam Morrison travels, Morrison gets a technical, the Bobcats bench gets a technical, Korver hits both technicals (this is about when Williams mentioned the possibility of a Bobcats mistake), Dalembert slams an alley-oop. 11-point lead, say hello to a 1-point deficit. Total elapsed time: 1 minute, 58 seconds. It was enough to make you splash aftershave on your face, put both hands on your cheeks, and scream.

Yet the Sixers would only score three more points and the Bobcats pulled it out, after which a graphic on the screen quite needlessly pointed out that this was the team’s first 3-game win streak of the season. Raymond Felton, who better not be complaining about not getting to play enough, had 14 points and 10 assists (technically he only had 9 but I’m giving him an unofficial one because I’m assuming he’s the one telling Walter Herrmann that those horrible “thong-headbands” sported by Mike Miller and Mike Dunleavey are a bad idea). Sean May, Okafor, and Morrison all played well, and Derek Anderson (15 points, 3 steals) has become our George Michael-ian father figure.

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