The Bobcat Deb Ball

Nacho: Since the Associated Press is totally bias when it comes to photos of tonight's 119-116 win by the Bobcats, I'll just post this nice picture of Charlotte Bobcat Arena.

It's time people: our breasts are budding, our dresses show off our onion booties, and we're winning games against tough opponents. Heck, even when we don't win, we come damn close. It's time for the Charlotte Bobcats to attend the Deb Ball..



Nacho cont'd: Bill Macy describes his occupation in David Mamet's "Things Change" by calling himself "the guy behind the guy, behind the guy." That's what this team feels like. We're not gonna make any noise in the post-season this year, but we've put together more quality wins in 37 games to call this season a success. I'm not sure who the Don Ameche is in this analogy, maybe the Heat. They seem pretty lost every night.

Anyway, this squad seems to be welcoming itself into society, like a dolled up Southern belle. We're asking the big scary guys (Detroit, Boston, etc.) to boogie, then showing them dances Daddy doesn't know about. That's right, we gots moves:



Brethren: This team is finally resembling some of those Bernie Bickerstaff teams from the first three years, with one major difference: playmakers at the end of the game.

A staple of those first three years is that we could sneak up on superior teams (read: nearly everyone) and hang with them through three and a half quarters. Most nights, we'd fail in the end and bemoan that we didn't know how to win. And believe you me, that's still a problem these days.

But last night showed that on an off-night, Jason Richardson is not afraid to take big shots. Gerald Wallace has the confidence to hit a 3 with the game under two minutes, as well as play at an All-Star level. And the defense shut them down when it was needed.

Sure, it's a long trek even to make it back to .500. But this stretch in 2008 has certainly been their best basketball to date.
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It's the Primary Pants Party Y'all!

Nacho: Tuesday, February 5th will be a day that lives in famy. It's the biggest day of Primary Season, Super Tuesday, it's the night Will Leitch will be in town, and best of all, since it's Tuesday that means one thing:

Presidential politics and Star Power,
a winning combination.

Details, after...


The editor of Deadspin and Ron Paul need no introduction, so here's the skinny:

Payin' the Billz

Starting at 7pm on Tuesday Mr. Leitch will be earnin' dem ducats at Book Soup bringing joy and wonder to the ennui-ridden sports fans of Los Angeles.

After the Show, It's the After-Party

Head over to Big Wangs Wings in Hollywood. It's one block North of the Arclight Cinerama dome and Good Tunes Haven, Ameoba Music. The tvs will be showing exit poll results, Andrew Bynum recovery updates, and, on the big screen by the bar, the ever-growing, ever-impressive Guitar Hero tournament. Watch, as the country starts down either a dark, sullen path or blazes a new trail to change....while absolutely owning some jerk playing "Sweet Child of Mine".

So c'mon down and join us. Wangs is the epicenter for all your sporting entertainment needs in LA, with HD TVs o' plenty, a big ass Wheel of Booze, and we might even break out the Beer Battleship board. The Royal We is coming: mother's hide your daughters.


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Herculean Bobcats Efforts

You're so pretty when you're angry. (Photo by Chuck Burton, AP.)
Brethren: The Bobcats don't have a healthy point guard on the roster (Ray Ray, McInnis (aka me), and DAnderson are all injured), and yet this team has taken the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Detroit Piston to double OT and OT, respectively, since their win over the Celtics on Wednesday.

That takes cajones. And since it's past time for "moral victories" to be accepted by this team, I like that head coach Sam Vincent is taking the latest loss (103-100 to Detroit at home) personally.

Here's how the game went down: The 'Cats dressed only 8, with rookie Jared Dudley and sharp-shooter-who-hasn't-done-that-so-far-this-year Matt Carroll as the starting backcourt. Despite the seemingly-outrageous obstacles, the Bobcats took the Pistons to OT. Here's where it gets tricky. Down one, J-Rich takes a fall-away jumper that looks like it's going to fall short. Seeing this, Mek tips the ball to the other side of the rim, and Nazr tips it in for the win!

Or wait, the refs, in their infinite wisdom, decide that Mek was goaltending, and the Bobcats turn the ball over to Pistons. Two made free throws later, another Bobcat loss.

Like I said, Sam Vincent is pissed. He wants the same treatment the Heat got against the Hawks in their loss from back in December. I'm with him. Video evidence, plus general musings, desde:

Brethren (cont'd): Well, ESPN won't let you embed their videos, and I can't get the file I downloaded from NBA.com to upload to YouTube, so here's the link to the video at the WWL. Visit them, watch the video, then come back.

Back? Yea, it definitely was a legal tip.

So even if David Stern continues his hate on the Bobcats and we don't get the same treatment as the Miami Heat, I like that Vincent is standing up for this team. Getting no respect from the officials was one of the staples of the first three years under good ole' Bernie Bickerstaff, and it seems to still be an issue under Sam Vincent.

That said, maybe if we had shot better than 65.6% from the free throw line, the game wouldn't have gone to OT. Just a thought.

Keep fightin, Cats. Bring on the Nuggets!

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The Most Un-Typical Bobcats Game Ever

Brethren: I'm just really excited they won.

Yes, J-Rich, you can score at will for us.

Bobcats 95, Celtics 83.

Not at what I was expecting after this. So after completing their second win in a row over a probable playoff team from the Eastern Conference, I can only believe that the Bobcats took to heart my dejection from them losing so pitifully on my birthday.

Other reasons, you ask? Go on.

Brethren (cont'd): Well, let's see what we can't think of:

- Ray Allen was hurt and didn't play. You might remember him from their first meeting in Charlotte, where he hit a last-second 3 pointer to beat the Bobcats.

- The boss showed up before yesterday's game and lit a fire under their collective arses.

Nacho: I think it's fairly clear why the scrappy 'Cats beat out the pre-eminent East Conference Leaders: They've been spending too much time with Silky Garrard. It just makes sense.

- Glen Davis sat out as well. I'd imagine he's just getting the hang of boxers. Needed a night to try it out on New England women.

- They feel real bad for the hometown feller whose in "really, really tough shape" after his spanking in New Hampshire. (Help my boy out.)

- Since we have Jordan, we can't disregard the idea that it could be The Shoes:


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Take It To The Bank: The Offseason

Nacho: So here we are, it's January and the Panthers, not unlike the Sports Brethren, are twiddling their thumbs. Now, here's your middle of the week re-cap of everything that will happen between now and the start of next season:

- The Panthers will address several of their many weaknesses in the draft, and lay low during free agency.

- The Bobcats will beat the Clippers on January 28th in Staples Center. While they might not voice it specifically, the majority of the team will attribute their victory to the crazed lunatic that kept distracting the Clips.

- The Bobcats will miss the playoffs.

- The Patriots will win the Super Bowl.

- Will Leitch will rock out at the Guitar Hero tournament.

- Vegas will never be the same.

For more check-in-the-mail certainties, join us desde

Nacho cont'd: I will find another job.

- LOST will be amazing.

- Scrubs will never get to shoot their finale.

Brethren: And for that, Brethren will probably cry for hours in the dark while wearing his Scrubs scrubs.

Some more absolutes in our world of uncertainity:

- The Panthers will take a defensive player in the first round of the NFL draft.

- I will dominate whomever I take on in the "NBA Equivalent Game," a spin-off of our "MLB Equivalent Game"

- I'll get a little sad (as I am right now) whenever I see Walter Herrmann in a Pistons uniform.

- The world of professional sand soccer will never be the same.

- The Panthers don't fire Jeff Davidson then hire Cam Cameron as Offensive Coordinator, even though Nacho just got a boner for me mentioning it. Ha ha, boner.

- JLew will continue to turn to blowing cocaine off stripper's tits as he has graduated from Clemson and moved to DC. It is, after all, DC.


- Nacho will care much more about POTUS '08 than Brethren will, but we'll both be sorely disappointed Ron Paul doesn't get a nomination.

- We'll make enough insightful posts about the Panthers to ensure young William selects us to write Deadspin's NFL Preview '08

- We'll rock out. Both with and without our cocks out.
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The Most Typical Bobcats Game Ever

Brethren: Last night for my birfday, a buddy of mine* from home bought four tickets to the Bobcats-Nets game in The Meadowlands. Section 239, row 24.

The last row in the arena. Still, it's an NBA game; it must cost thousands of dollars per year to purchase those regular season tickets.

$13.50. He bought the four tickets for a total of $13.50. Total. $3.38 (rounding up) per ticket. The most outrageous deal I'd ever heard of.

So we gathered two other friends from home who live in/near the city, hopped on the bus, and we made it to the Izod Center (my sisterin and I had a funny discussion on why Izod chose to spend its marketing dollars on an arena in East Rutherford, NJ -- seriously, why?). We bought beer and headed up the steep incline to our seats.

The full game story, desde

* Friend not Steve Nash, but the writer of that post

Brethren (cont'd) Of course, there was a large family sitting in our seats. Not willing to get into a confrontation when so many open terrible seats were available, we plopped ourselves in the second to last row of a neighboring section. After a smoking hot 16-year-old chick sang the National Anthem, the game was ready to go.

(Can I say that she was smoking hot? Now that I'm officially 7 years older than her, is that ok? I mean, she was. Fuck that high school football player that's taking her down. Fuck him, seriously.)

The view from our seats. That court is far away.

And the Bobcats came out gunning. J-Rich came out on fire. Felton and McInnis were controlling the tempo. GWallace was flying all over the place. We built a 13 point lead. Even with that lead, a sense of doom was all our group of Bobcats fans could feel. We had the lead, and yet we knew that wasn't going to be maintained.

The Nets lurve them some old-school amenities in the Izod Center. Such as this crystal-clear, high-def scoreboard.

It didn't. The lead shrank to six points by halftime. Our group moved down to seats still in our section that were about ten rows from the bottom to see if that could help the inevitable. It didn't. We were down two going into the fourth. Suddenly, we couldn't do anything right. Turnovers, turnovers, turnovers, turnovers. They started a lay-up line. Darrell Armstrong was hitting 3s. At one point in the fourth, we were down 12. It ended up as a six point loss.

The view from our second half seats. The view was better, our team was not.

Ultimately, that's the thing about being a Bobcats fan right now; the team just can't maintain a lead, they can't close a team out. It's really like the other team goes on cruise control then turns it on and we can't do anything about it. At some point, it's our fourth season and I'm ready for this team to become a winner.

Until then, drunk faces!


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Week 17: Our Inevitable March to 7-9

If the MJD can post a Smorgasbord on Wednesday, we can post our Week 17 thoughts on a Wednesday night.

SportsBrethren: Godspeed, Vinny.


Brethren: I believe I read something before Sunday's game that said if we won and finished 7-9, it would be the 6th time in the Carolina Panthers' 13 year history that we vanquished a season with that record.

Boom, bitches.

7-9. Pretty sweet fuckin record if you ask me. Think about all the sweet shit you get with a 7-9 record:

- A midrange first round draft pick, probably somewhere from #13 to 16. Pretty sure we can pick up a fast linebacker from Miami or an SEC school. Aaaaand we will.
- Just enough optimism to think about how, man, if two games had gone our way, we'd be sitting pretty in a wild card spot.
- The knowledge that the Panthers went 7-9 in John Fox's first year; we went to the Super Bowl the next year.

Like I said, boom, bitches. More general cogitations on Week 17, including Nacho's crazy antics and my patented bulleted thoughts:

Brethren (cont'd): My patented bulleted thoughts:

- This week, instead of the usual bar we attend, I instead went with two of my buddies who are twins at ESPNZone. That's right; it was the twins' birthdays and they had Mommy's credit card. High priced cheap beer and appetizers: fuck yea.

- The Panthers were on a tiny screen in the top left corner; in the sea of meaningless Week 17 games, ESPN in NYC considered ours to be one of the least deserving of a prime real estate TV. Sweet.

- Is our QB situation kinda figured out? With a season like this where Chris Weineke is starting games, a healthy Jake is certainly one of the top 10-15 starters out there. Young guns Matt Moore and Brett Basanez certainly can be serviceable in back-up roles. And after watching Colt Brennan shit the bed, if he's the best college has to offer, I'll stick with Jake, Doc Holliday, and BB Gunz.

- BB Gunz. Yea, I just made up a nickname for Brett Basanez. Canuck would be proud.

- Well besides the beauty of the 7-9 finish, there's not much memorable about this game. Tampa didn't really play their good players; when they did earlier this year, they dominated us. So I can't really conclude we're better than them. But like I said, time has proven that 7-9 fits the Panthers franchise just fine.

Nacho: First things last: how the fuck have we had commercial air travel for nigh over half a century, and there's still no "sick bays"? Ships have 'em, I'm pretty trains have 'em (if I remember Under Seige 2: Dark Territory correctly.) Hell, I bet stagecoaches had 'em. But we let some woman carrying some strain of Bavarian Bubonic Plague just sit there in seat 18D on the 8am cross-country flight from Charlotte to San Francisco. Just sit there and cough. A lot. And give me the plague. Thanks, dipshit industry.

Now, onto the Panthers. Despite me earlier feelings I'm ok with us barely missing the playoffs with a bunch of fourth stringers. I think we should give Foxy one more year with a healthy starting QB en route to a career year again, then see how interested Cowher is.

Julius, congratulations, you're the Antoine Walker of the NFL: you got paid, then took the year off. On the bright side, you won't have to spend a week in Hawaii this spring, unlike some people

Mr. Steve Smith, I have but one thing to say to you:



I look forward to a healthy team with fresher biscuit, in 2008. If it's not too much trouble, I'd like to get healthy too.
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