"I thought we had a whole lot of All-Star (break) rust," Coach Sam Vincent said after the Bobcats managed to pull off the rare feat of holding the opposition to 85 points and still getting blown out.  I really don’t know how one can chalk this up to “All-Star rust,” considering we had no involvement with the All-Star game whatsoever.  We didn’t even have any Rookie-Sophomore Game participants this year.    So we ought to just call it “Sitting-Around-On-The-Couch-And-Playing-Lots-of-Halo-3-Break Rust,” because Emeka Okafor, Jason Richardson, and Gerald Wallace combined to shoot 5-of-29 in a loss to San Antonio that was more rambling and incoherent than Michael Jordan’s latest ESPN: The Magazine interview.  Based on our collective 28% shooting, we’re also not going to be a threat to send anyone to the All-Star H-O-R-S-E competition either, if the NBA ever creates one. 
 
Tim Duncan, against whom Okafor normally plays fairly decently, shot just 2-of-12 himself, but he was a key component anyway in the Spurs win.  “(Duncan’s) defense at the rim and that sort of thing is always important to us,” Coach Gregg Popovich noted (5 blocks, 5 assists, 15 boards, and a steal was presumably the “sort of thing” Popovich was talking about).  Duncan also held former teammate Nazr Mohammed to a paltry 5-of-13 shooting and a measly 6 boards.  Mohammed was our biggest bench contributor, but possibly I only mean that literally and not figuratively, because Vincent somehow thought it was a good idea to give Jeff McInnis 33 minutes of “run.”
 
Tell me we’re showcasing McInnis for a trade, Coach, please?  Just do that and all my pain will go away!  Apparently, Memphis’s Kyle Lowry is on the trading block.  You know Lowry only makes about a mil?  We could give the Grizzlies McInnis (or, more accurately, McInnis’s expiring contract) plus either Jermareo Davidson or Ryan Hollins and it’d be nearly even.  And here’s a really scary thought: we trade them Othella Harrington ('s expiring contract) for Lowry and they’d actually owe US a million.  Welcome to the wacky world of bad contracts!  I know these are stupid and—with any other team—borderline insulting trade proposals, but considering the shrewd deals Grizzlies have been pulling lately, I thought it was worth mentioning.  Boy oh boy.  33 minutes…Four points…No assists.  This guy should be the 5th PG option for the Sacramento Kings, behind Beno Udrih, Anthony Johnson, Tyronn Lue, and Quincy Douby.  Instead, he gets 33 minutes for us.             
 
Anyway, besides the decision to play Jeff McInnis for 33 minutes, the Spurs relied heavily on Manu Ginobli (18 points, including 9-of-11 FT shooting), and they also got random contributions from Michael Finley (14 points) and Ime Udoka (12 points).  Because of his first name, I’m sort of hoping that Udoka someday develops a reputation as a selfish prima donna and gets traded to the Knicks—the headline writers for The Daily News and The New York Post would have a field day with that one.  The Spurs also defended their way through a memorably muddled first half for everyone involved, and they leveraged our cold stretch before halftime to take the lead for good.             
 
“Cold stretch”—like we were ever hot.  Gerald Wallace was a total ghost, as was Jason Richardson.  Raymond Felton attacked the hoop with his usual gusto, but he frequently failed to finish on the Spurs’ bigs.  21 Spurs turnovers (the first 11 on steals) and their own poor shooting were the only reasons the game was ever competitive.  Their 54 rebounds to our 33—sorry, 38 (I can’t seem to get that number out of my head)—was one of the many reasons it eventually wasn’t…     

Don’t call it a comeback!!  Umm, because it wasn’t one.  Neither of them was, actually.  Charlotte hosted two-thirds of the Texas Triangle this week, and although we threatened to win at times in both games, our efforts slowly deteriorated—much like Tom Coughlin’s face in the NFC Championship Game.  That we didn’t win either game is kind of sad, but hardly surprising—like hearing Ike Turner’s cause of death was a cocaine overdose.  There are some reasons to be optimistic, though. 
 
First, Gerald Wallace—our 6’7” can of Red Bull—doesn’t appear to be injured (at least, anymore than he usually is) after he pulled up lame against Memphis and San Antonio.  As an added bonus, Crash also seems to have ditched that ill-fated attempt at cornrows and gone back to his traditional, mid-sized econo-'fro. 
 
Second, neither announcer in either game used the silly, superfluous phrase, “He can do that.”  I’ve started to hate that phrase, and I’m sorry to say that I first noticed it coming from the mouth of one of our own: the late, great Matt Devlin.  Yes, yes, I know he’s a legend, but Matt had the unfortunate tendency to say, “He can do that” a lot.  And then a lot of announcers began invoking the “he can do that” tendency.  What’s the problem with “he can do that?”  Well, it’s right uttered after the player did, in fact, do that.  It doesn’t matter what the “that” was—in Matt’s case, for example, the “that” was often Brevin Knight pulling up and hitting a 15-foot jumper, followed inevitably by Matt saying, “He can do that.”  This in turn would cause me, sitting at home, to say aloud, “Yes, Matt, obviously he can do that, because we all just watched it.”  And now it’s everywhere; it had a bizarre viral spread to all the announcers.  Now it seems everyone loves to note unnecessarily that a player "can do that"…except in these last two games, and for that I’m optimistic.  Speaking of Brevin, I’m happy to see he’s been suiting up for most of the season with the Clips.  Be wary, though, Clippers fans, this tends to be the time of year when his groin goes on a 2-month sabbatical.       
 
Third—and I’ll admit this one’s connection to actual basketball is even less significant than the first two—my office building survived the attack from the Cloverfield monster.  I didn’t see the movie, but check out that poster that shows a decapitated Statue of Liberty and most of the entire south end of Manhattan in flames.  See that building on the far left, the one with the dome?  That’s us—still standing, baby! 
 
As for the games, let’s start with the Spurs.  For whatever reason, we always tend to play them hard—we’re like the Devil Rays to their Yankees.  Early on, we led by as many as 8, and we stayed within 4 points late in the third.  But then San Antonio clamped down on defense (they can do that), blocking a total of 10 shots, notching 11 steals, holding us to only 39 second-half points, and limiting us to just 4 fast-break points.  We also made an abysmal two total 3-pointers, while Michael Finley—who resembles a younger Greg Oden (ha!)—went 3-for-3 from downtown by himself.   
 
Speaking of 3-pointers, we’re going through a sort of 3-point stagflation right now.  On the heels of 2-for-14 long-range shooting against San Antonio, we went 3-for-18 in the next game against Dallas.  Let's see…we’re currently 14th in the league in 3-point percentage and 16th in attempts.  So basically, we take an average amount and make an average amount…And that kills everything I was planning to say, because I was hoping to discover something profound like we’re dead last in 3-point shooting but take the most shots—dammit, so much for that hypothesis.  Still, here’s how we closed out the last 2:30 of the 3rd quarter against the Mavs: Richardson missed a 3, Felton missed a 3, Wallace missed a 3, Carroll missed a 3.  Too bad Nazr Mohammed didn’t attempt a three, otherwise we could have had a complete set.
 
The Dallas game in general was an opportunity lost in the swamp of a stagnant offense.  We failed to capitalize on a 5-minute, 32-second Maverick scoring drought in the fourth quarter by only cutting their lead from 12 points to 7.  Besides all the missed treys, there was way too much standing around.  It was so bad that even the Dallas announcers began to sound frustrated with our lack of motion.  We didn’t get the ball to Mohammed nearly enough (nor did he demand it—7 points on just 3 FG attempts in 27 minutes), and basically just hoped for either Richardson or Wallace to engineer something on their own.  There also wasn’t enough sliding on the defensive end, which is unfathomable because Devin Harris, Jason Terry, and JJ Barea don’t do much other than get to the hoop quickly—thus the opposition has got to be ready to help.  Harris alone torched us for 23 points, most of which were unassisted drives and pull-ups. 
 
And in both games, we saw how limited Okafor is against the benchmark big guys, Duncan and Nowitzki.  They do everything Okafor does, plus they do it better, plus they do more.  If they’re Transformers, he’s a Gobot.  For instance, both are capable of playing much farther out on the perimeter, and as they made painfully obvious: if you pull Okafor too far from the basket on defense, he’s lost.  His offense was solid, but just a block and ten rebounds in each game just isn’t enough.
 
Oh, well.  Perhaps I should just “Accept Roster Reality,” as the Observer’s Rick Bonnell urges.  Apparently, our lineup dilemmas, like playing Okafor at the 5 and Wallace at the 4, and playing McInnis at all, are “unavoidable.”  I fail to see how he arrived at this conclusion (as do the string of hilarious responses posted afterward), but perhaps that's the very point he’s trying to make: it doesn’t make sense, just accept it.  I can do that, I guess…