The Charlotte Bobcats haven’t won a basketball game since St. Patrick’s Day (a home win over the Toronto Raptors, thank you very much). Their closest loss, or nearest win if you’re a glass-half-full person, was by three points in overtime; there were also a couple of five-point defeats mixed in there, but mostly this 21-game losing streak has not been heartbreaker after bad bounce after heartbreaker, that would be too poetic. This streak, a macrocosm of this season, has been one big, giant broken heart of a basketball team.
And this is not the lovelorn sort of broken heart you’d see in a Nicholas Sparks book-on-film or vampire angst-love story, but rather a team’s, a franchise’s, heart and soul literally smashed into tiny shards of unrecognizable fibers; so much so that the only logical thing for those caught in this bear trap of sadness to do is let the prophecy play itself out, going down not just in flames but also with the dissociative apathy that I think anyone could understand if they too were in a place so dark, so void of hope or a connected, well-timed alley-oop pass and finish. The best and, maybe really, only answer is to curl into a ball on the floor and wait for it all to be over.
Two more games. Wednesday and Thursday night, the Bobcats play basketball for the final two times in this regular season. Then the league-wide focus will shift entirely to the postseason, leaving the Bobcats to finally be free of themselves. In what is the opposite of the mercy rule, Charlotte’s last gasp, their season-ending tilt with the New York Knicks at home on Thursday, will be televised for the world to see on TNT. There, throughout the telecast — assuming the game itself won’t be providing the necessary talking points from opening tip to final buzzer — the Bobcat’s twisted joke of a season will be examined and pulled apart by each excruciating statistical category; the footage of missed layups, turnovers and everything else that can make the beautiful game of basketball spring such obvious warts will be brought to the forefront even more-so than a quick segment on Sportscenter can. The Bobcats’ corpse, even if pronounced dead long ago, will be cut up and poked at like a fetal pig in a high school biology class. Only this time the dissection is not to understand what something is or how it works, but to try piecing together what went so horrifically wrong.
Where the Bobcats go from this, whether they end up getting the lucky lottery ball that gives them the rights to Anthony Davis or some other draft day savior, feels like a question too far away to answer. A basketball question, one of rebuilding or making sure something like this season never happens again would, in most cases, be the next logical step following the end of a disappointing (understatement in this case) year. For Charlotte, it’s addressing a wound that hasn’t even begun to stop bleeding yet, much less heal. Basketball, until it’s draft time and the playoffs are completed with a champion crowned, is probably the last thing the Bobcats want to be talking, or thinking, about.
When TNT’s broadcast wraps up on Thursday night, with Charlotte either being able to take one small grain of happiness away — going out on top on the smallest scale — or just getting to the portion of the schedule where all that’s left is a merciful end, the Bobcats probably need to disappear until their number’s called again. Many involved, I’m sure, likely do not need this suggested. The rebuilding process, even if that means next season almost assuredly can’t be any worse, will begin soon enough. At that time we will all remember the suffocating defeat that shrouded this Bobcats’ team; at that time we can think of what could possibly come next, while hoping, for the sake of the Bobcats, their fans, or anyone who just wants the best for the NBA as a league, that this somehow can trend upwards, even if it’s at the molecular level. Baby steps, so long as they’re forward, are still steps in the right direction, after all. For now, though, after the regular season concludes I think it’d be best if everyone, including the Bobcats, just forgot about the Bobcats for awhile.
Griffin Gotta contributes to The Hoop Doctors and is a co-managing editor of Straight Outta Vancouver. The story arcs and infinite weirdness of the NBA are addictions he deals with every day. Email him at griffingotta at gmail dot com.
