Things We Should Totally Petition For, number 2

Seattle Supersonics, no more, the, are. Or something.

Now, they're Oklahoma City.

I don't really get why this is. It seems to have something to do with the arena being a bit crap, and apparently the taxpayers won't pay for a new one. I'm not interested enough to find out quite why the taxpayers are supposed to be paying for it in the first place (is this standard, and if so, why?), but needless to say, the American sports 'franchise' culture is the spawn of Satan, American culture in general is inferior, God save the Queen, I'm a communist, et cetera.

(By the way, I'm right on this. So right am I that I will not take the time to fully explain quite what I'm right about, because I feel it unnecessary. So read on, confused and slightly alienated reader.)

Anyway. As a part of the settlement severance that the franchise and the city made, the Supersonics name stays in Seattle. Therefore, the Oklahoma City franchise needs a new nickname. And apparently, the Oklahoman is down to choosing between the final four in their unofficial (I assume) contest - it's either going to be the Thunder, the Thunderbirds, the Outlaws, and the Barons.

Is it just me, or do they all suck? Can't we petition to stop the madness? Or at least think of something better?

I mean, I can't think of something better. I'm an idiot, and I'm immature. These two things form an unbreakable alliance, and the first idea that came into my head was the 'Showertraps', proof enough that I haven't the cognitive capacity nor testitcular verticality to really be put in charge here.

That said, if we all pitched in, couldn't we find something that didn't suck? What is Oklahoma City famous for? Couldn't we find something relative to that? (Note: if you say "The Oklahoma City Bombers", you'll go to hell.) Can we at least make a better fist of it than the last time a franchise had to be nicknamed, and we got stuck with the Bobcats?

(Or, failing that, let's push for the Showertraps.)

Offseason Preview: Charlotte Bobcats

The second in a new series of posts detailing teams financial outlooks for the upcoming free agency period, what cap room they have, what exceptions, what draft slots, etc. Should be fascinatingly fascinating, if you're easily pleased.

No information is 100% guaranteed accurate, but unless you're privy to hitherto unknown information, or just better at this than I am (highly possible), then it's probably more accurate than you.

To be completed in an order best described as "Random".

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  Charlotte Bobcats


Currently Committed Salary, 2008/09:

Jason Richardson - $12,222,221
Gerald Wallace - $9,500,000
Nazr Mohammed - $6,049,400
Matt Carroll - $5,050,000
Adam Morrison - $4,159,200
Raymond Felton - $4,148,715
Sean May - $2,661,026
Jared Dudley - $1,222,320

Total: $45,012,882



Team options:
Othella Harrington - $2,552,000 (no chance)
Jermareo Davidson - $711,517 (probable)

Total including options: $48,276,399



Unrestricted Free Agents:

Derek Anderson (cap hold - $1,001,793)
Earl Boykins (cap hold - $924,732)



Restricted Free Agents:

Emeka Okafor (qualifying offer - $7,082,635, cap hold - $13,568,268)
Ryan Hollins (qualifying offer - $972,581, cap hold - $893,693)



Draft picks:

First round: 8th pick, subject to lottery results. (Cap hold - $2,002,600)
Second round: 38th pick (no cap hold)



Cap room/exceptions:

None, unless they renounce Okafor....which they won't. MLE and BAE, no trade exceptions.




Depth chart if you take all the free agents away:

PG - Felton
SG - Richardson, Carroll
SF - Dudley, Morrison
PF - Wallace, May
C - Mohammed



Sensible things to do:

Change coach. Re-sign Okafor, but don't overpay - let him find out how weak the market is the hard way. Get backup guards that don't suck, and whose presence the coach won't hold against Felton. Keep Hollins or Davidson, but not really both because there's not much point. Pray for a rainout.

Reason No. 451 Why The Bulls Suck This Year

They were supposed to lose this game.

But, clearly, they didn't. Not even close, in fact. Rather than lose, the Bulls instead nearly set a franchise record for most points in a regulation game.

Teriffic.

Yet, I can't be annoyed at this. It may not have been the optimum result in terms of the Bulls long term future (it pains me to admit that the one draft spot they could potentially gain from losing out is the most useful thing that could possibly come out of the Bulls disastrous season now), but it was great effing fun, if nothing else. It would have been even more fun had I actually watched the game. I'm sure of that.

More inspiring still was the complete randomness of it. The fact that the Bucks have been a special kind of shit on defense all year is a well documented truth. But the fact that the team with the worst FG% in the league - and by a reasonably comfortable margin - just shot 68% in a game, is friggin' staggering. Especially coming from a team with the cohesiveness of a early morning shit after a night on the Stella, like the Bulls currently have.

However, all the time the score was being run up, I couldn't help but think that it wasn't enough. 151 points is fan-freakin'-tastic, but it pales compared to the 168 points that Denver put up earlier this season. And this made me disappointed - since when was 151 points 'remarkable', but not league leading?

It's a damn good period of the NBA's history that we currently live in where things like this can happen.



Also, some individual performances need some praise and some scorn. The statline of Ramon Sessions no doubt jumps at you. His 24 assists is not quite an NBA rookie record, for the record is 25, jointly held by Nate McMillan and some guy called Ernie DiGregorio. But it's definitely the rookie record of recent times, surpassing Jamaal Tinsley's rookie effort of 23 in a game, back in the days when he used to pass first. (Note: I am going off of memory here, and didn't look to check if any rookie had topped that mark since.) So this effort pushes Tinsley further out of sight and out of mind, which can only be a good thing.

Unfortunately, to look at Sessions's effort, properly, you need some context. The first 20+ point and 20+ assist game in Bucks history was undermined somewhat by Chris Duhon's statline of 15 assists with 0 turnovers, along with scoring 22 points on 9 shots. All of this took place in 14 less mintes than what Sessions played. Had he played the same amount of minutes as Sessions (44), he almost certainly would have had better overall numbers than Sessions did.

And this is a bad thing, because this is Chris Duhon we're talking about. Chris Duhon, in his penultimate game as a Chicago Bull, no less. Duhon's tenure with the Bulls has always been highlighted by the occasional staggeringly brilliant performance, be it his triple double versus Charlotte, his eight made three pointers versus Atlanta, or his 38 point game versus the Warriors this season. Every four months or so, he turns in a performance so dominating that you can't help but wonder what it is that makes him so shit for the other 80 games of the season. And tonight, he has done this again. But this is no excuse for Sessions to let him put up numbers of such magnitude - it is, after all, Chris Duhon. At some point, you have to make him look like the shitty point guard that he is.

Also, who would have thought that one of the most high scoring games of the past decade could have possibly involved Michael Ruffin logging significant minutes? (I had an interesting follow-up point to this, but Muffin ruined it by scoring the final basket of the game, to finish with a mesmeric 2 points. Bastard. By the way, for those who still haven't got the memo, Michael Ruffin is the worst offensive player of all time. His profile proves this.)

For points per shot fans such as myself, this game was a stunner. For Bulls fans such as myself, this game was polarising. For Bucks fans, this game was more of the same - you know what you're getting by now, and you don't like it, but at least Sessions gives you false hope. (I'd trade him by the next deadline if I were you. Sell high. See also: Tinsley, Jamaal.) And for Chris Duhon fans, you get one final chance to see your hero in action for the team that will probably constitute 80% of his entire NBA career.

So, something for everybody there.

When the hell did Ben Wallace change his free throw shooting technique?

Tom Dore stole my thunder. Bastard.

I had this post planned as of the third quarter of the Bulls vs Bobcats game last night, and then Bulls play by play announcer Dore made the observation himself in the fourth. The git.

But anyway. Yes. Ben Wallace has changed his free throw style, and I have two crudely filmed videos to prove it. One of which I stole off Youtube, and one of which was filmed via the scientific approach of pointing my mobile phone at my monitor. Always bringing you quality.



This is the classic Ben, articulately shown with a swish to crap all over Miami's plans to deliberately foul him, thus completing their humiliating first round capitulation to a far superior Chicago team that made them look like the wanky has-beens that they are and this sentence is starting to run on a bit now by the way happy new year:


This is the new wave Wallace, with an uncharacteristic miss (just pretend that it goes in).


How about that knee bend! The stubborn bastard took a hint! Wow!

Someone get Scott Skiles on the blower and press him for answers as to how this happened. And then try and convince him to try practicing some layups.

(Seriously, does he practice them?)

30 teams in 524 or so days: Charlotte

Players acquired via free agency or trade:

Jason Richardson (acquired from Golden State)



Players acquired via draft:

First round: Jared Dudley (22nd overall)
Second round: Jermareo Davidson (36th overall)



Players retained:

Derek Anderson (re-signed, one year minimum)
Jeff McInnis (re-signed, one year minimum)
Matt Carroll (re-signed, six years, $26,900,000)
Gerald Wallace (re-signed, six years, $57,000,000)
Ryan Hollins (exercised team option)
Walter Herrmann (exercised team option)
Primoz Brezec (opted in)




Players departed:

Alan Anderson (signed in Italy)
Jake Voskuhl (opted out, signed with Milwaukee)
Brevin Knight (waived, signed with L.A. Clippers)



Bobbins:

In a recent debate with someone about who the eight playoff teams in the East are going to be this season, debate raged as to who would be the 8th team. We discussed the possibility of the eighth seed being Orlando, Washington, Milwaukee, and even Atlanta, before finally settling on one which I won't mention (because it will spoil a later post).

Neither of us debated the possibility of Charlotte being the eighth seed. This is because we had both already pencilled them as the seventh, with absolutely no contention from each other.

There's two possible conclusions that you can draw here. The first would be that the two of us basically don't know what the hell we are talking about, which is a good point well made that I am unable to counter. The second would be to assume that, yes, Charlotte is a playoff calibre team. And that point, I can defend.

The franchise got off to a slow start after expansion, as you would expect, but slowly the Bobcats picked up pieces along the way. Starting around Emeka Okafor and building outwards, nothing much has gone right for the Bobcats before this summer. Mired deep in the lottery, and bound by the salary cam limitations that the NBA seems to strangely enjoy putting onto new franchises, the Bobcats achieved little on-the-court success, struggling through the growing pains that expansion teams are somewhat mandated to go through. All the losing didn't really pay off either, given the shockingly unsuccessful selection of Adam Morrison at number 3 in last year's draft.

Along the way, though, the Bobcats have slowly been assembling pieces. Despite only Gerald Wallace and Primoz Brezec remaining on the roster from their initial expansion draft (someone's going to have to explain to me one day quite what the point was of selecting so many free agents that they then didn't sign), Charlotte have picked some players up along the way for cheap, players that have helped their on-court product. Brevin Knight (recently waived, but we'll come to that) added veteranness and that, and also played fairly well. Pickups on the cheap such as Matt Carroll and Walter Herrmann have paid dividends, and the Bobcats have added good young players through the draft such as Okafor and Raymond Felton (notice that I didn't list Morrison).

This summer, they added the scoring punch that they sorely lacked, in obtaining Jason Richardson from Golden State for next to nothing. The move has its downsides - with contract extensions for Felton and Okafor coming up in the not-too-distant future, and with Gerald Wallace and Matt Carroll re-signing this summer to 6 year contracts, adding the big salary of Richardson takes away the financial flexibility that Charlotte previously enjoyed. It commits them to this current core for at least the short term, whether it is good enough or not. And it also means that the awesome unredoubtable Matt Carroll gets less court time, which is disappointing for all concerned. But it plugs the slightly important 20 point a game scorer that Charlotte has always lacked. Draw your own Jason Richardson/Michael Jordan comparisons, they're all stupid.

In addition to this, the Bobcats spend well in retaining most of their players from last year, and obtained two possible rotation players in Jared Dudley and Jermareo Davidson via the draft. I don't really know any more about them than that, so I'll leave that there.





Next year:

As I said above, Charlotte seemed like a strange choice for automatic inclusion into my predicted playoff seedings. They haven't, to coin a phrase, done shit yet. But despite being only a 33 win team a year ago, they have three big factor working for them:

a) They had a big infusion of talent this offseason, more so than most teams.
b) They have continued interal growth from their young core players.
c) They're relatively healthy. Well, except Sean May.

To elaborate on point C, the Bobcats do have an injury prone roster. Star big man Emeka Okafor has played in only 166 of the 246 games of his career, which is a poor ratio, and star forward Gerald Wallace set a career high in games played last year with a rather uninspiring 72.

Everyone is healthy at the moment, apart from Sean May, who is to miss the season with more surgery on his cartilege-free knees, and who I'm willing to bet never plays more than 40 NBA games for the rest of his life. Despite the fact that injuries to the Bobcats are about as inevitable as a Jonny Gomes swing and a miss on a down and away curveball, they have the sort of depth right now thay they have never had before, which will help them to overcome it. Last year's starter Matt Carroll is now a key bench player, joinining a deep wing rotation including Wallace, Richardson, Dudley, Morrison, and last's year breakout player and Lord of the Sex, Walter Herrmann. Herrmann shined late last season filling in as an emergency power forward as the injuries piled up yet again, but he's now faced with lengthy stays on the bench as Charlotte stocked up the wing positions this summer. It also appears that head coach Sam Vincet thinks it's best to start Emeka Okafor at power forward alongside Richardson, Walace and either Primoz Brezec or Ryan Hollins at center, and we can only hope that it won't take long fo rhim to realise that it would be best to play Okafor at center with Wallace and Herrmann as the forwards. Walter needs his court time, dammit, if us neutrals are to have any interest in watching Charlotte this year.

The Bobcats are weak at the center position though, in spite of their improved depth, and Jeff McInnis is the full time backup point guard. But it's not really that important: the backup point guard spot has never been important enough to be able to sabotage an entire season, even if it is Jeff McInnis. After all, the San Antonio Spurs just won a title without a backup point guard worth a damn. By the way, someone (namely me) ought to point out the irony of waiving Brevin Knight for reported chemistry issues and locker room diviseness, then re-signing Mr Chemistry 2007 McInnis to take his place. A strange one, that.

Nonetheless, the Bobcats plugged other gaps, andTo make the playoffs, the Bobcats only realistically need about 8 more wins. Is adding a 20 point scorer for no real cost good enough to do that, especially when youf actor in all the other shit that I outlined above?

Probably.