Gameday Preview: Bobcats at the Pacers

Charlotte travels to Indiana to face the Pacers.  The teams are in a dead-heat for the 8th spot in the East but to me, it’s another game.  Seriously folks, we haven’t reached the All-Star break yet.  I’m running a new site here and I realize “heat,” excitement, whatever you want to call it are good things to generate “buzz.”  But I’m not going to act all excited just to hopefully get a bit of “traffic” or “hits.”  I like to type my air quotes and if you had a video of me typing this, I actually do air quotes while typing.  I feel sort of like I’m Dr. Evil and the keyboard is Mini-Me.

I get the implications.  It usually comes down to a game, a tie break, a whisker of hope to get into that 8th spot or the difference between 8th and 7th.  But if you’re talking about just getting in, you’d be facing Miami or Boston in the first round.  It’s like saying, “Hi, we’re the Charlotte Trees.  We’re here to face either the Miami Chainsaws or the Boston Axes….one way or another, I bet we’re going down!”  It’s not pessimism, it’s realism.  I keeps it real.

I don’t look at it like we’re fighting Indiana for the last spot.  I look at it like Indiana is a team that the Bobcats are using as a stepping stone to begin to roll up a streak of wins or at least a solid run with a loss or two sprinkled in.  Look at the standings:

You’re seeing three things there, Charlotte is .002 ahead of Indiana, 4.5 games back of Super-Cool flashy New York and in the last 10 Games, Charlotte has a better record than New York, same as Orlando and 1 back of the pace of Boston and Atlanta.  Larry Brown may have put us in some kind of huge hole but Paul Silas is coaching a team that’s on its way up.

It’s not that this game doesn’t matter but it doesn’t have the same repurcussions that so many today are spouting.  Bonnell is saying that the ‘Cats have lost their season series against the teams around them in the standings, so those tiebreakers are out the window, lost forever into the black abyss of early season Larry Brown fueled losses.  That’s true, it’s just a matter of facts and rules and ok, if it came down to that…it’d be an issue.  However, I don’t see it coming down to that!

If you watch NASCAR racing, especially at the restrictor plate tracks, Ol’ DW always says “There’s gonna be comers and there’s gonna be goers.”  The Bobcats, by no means surging, are a team on the come.  (Brief aside:  I hate how some words have been ruined, so just clear your sick head and don’t think about how those previous two sentances sounded if you’re as immature as I am)  Teams like New York, Indiana, Milwaukee and Philadelphia don’t seem to me, a casual observer for those teams, to be built for the long haul.  There are rumors out there that New York is going to trade half their assets for Carmello Anthony.  I personally think they won’t and shouldn’t because they’re going to get him in free agency anyway but that’s beside the point.  Raymond Felton, as any Bobcats fan knows, is a durable point guard, he’s tough like Ben Rothleisburger.  But he isn’t Superman and can’t continue to play at the level he’s at.  Somebody tried to connect the dots on them trading for Aaron Brooks but all it did to me was point out their glaring hole behind Ray.  I looked at the league leaders in minutes, he’s in the top 5.

Milwaukee is in the same boat.  They’ve got nobody averaging more than 16 points per game so it’s like an amalgum of scoring every night, you don’t know where it’s going to come from.  Their guys get injured at a pretty good clip.  John Salmons recently missed time, Delfino has been hurt, Drew Gooden has been in and out of the lineup.  It’s sort of a mess and Scott Skiles is not known for being an easy going dude that’s comfortable with a bit of free-flow, let the guys play locker room mentality.  They’re not likely to make an extended run.  They beat Washington, Cleveland, Toronto but lost to basically everybody else here lately…they’re goers!

Philadelphia, behind Doug Collins’ goofy ass, is actually playing well right now.  I don’t keep up with them because, their uniforms annoy me, their players piss me off and I had a horrible experience inside the Philadelphia Spectrum as a child.  Email me for the details, I don’t want to go into it right now but it was horrible!  They beat the everliving crap out of Atlanta last night and Mike Cranston tweeted the following

Awesome, so they’ll be rested and pissed!

So onto the overview of tonight’s opponent, the Indiana Pacers.  They fired their head coach on my birthday, 10 days ago.  Since then, under interim coach Frank Vogel (wasn’t that McLovin’s real name in Superbad?), the Pacers have had a resurgence, winning four straight until falling last night in Miami.  They found themselves sort of in the same circumstance with an aging coach, a defined legendary leader at the helm and a losing record in a weak Eastern Conference.  So they made a move, only they promoted rather than getting rid of all of errbody like the Bobcats did.

The Pacers (by the way, dumbest name for a team ever) have opened things up for their younger players like former ACC standouts Josh McRoberts and Tyler Hansborough.  They pack the ball down low to Roy Hibbert, who is becoming a solid player, not the stone structure I figured him to be after his first season.  Kwame Brown figures to be a good matchup for Hibbert.  Size seems to be pretty close, with Kwame listed at 6’11” and 270 and Hibbert at 7’2″ and 278.  I just cringe though, when I think about Danny Granger.  I wrote earlier this year over at BobcatsPlanet.com:  Danny Granger was his usual self Wednesday night, putting up 26 points but on 10-19 shooting.  Odd stat on Danny, in the past 2 years, he scored 18 in the first meeting with Charlotte and 26 in the second….if he scores 18 tonight…cue the Twilight Zone music.  He averages 21.1 against the ‘Cats in the past 4 years, right around his average of 20.85 (I throw out his rookie year, 7.5 PPG for this guy?  C’mon).  So Mr. Granger is likely to get his 20ish, don’t know if there’s any way around that.

He just is, and he just scores.  The key to this matchup is timing.  The Bobcats are rested, off of that big win against Boston, where consequently, the starters got a lot of rest.  The Pacers player in Miami last night, got in late, probably won’t have much of a shootaround today and they lost.  Momentum?  Timing?  Matchups?  I see it all in the Bobcats favor.  So if they can build on the Boston win, follow it with a win against a team battling for their playoff lives, as are the Bobcats, they will be moving up the standings and away from issues like tiebreakers and season series that Larry Brown squandered with his inability to reason out a gameplan.

Worrying about little things like “We HAVE to beat Indiana” rather than gathering momentum and rallying the team are things fans and writers think about.  My sense is Paul Silas, Mr. Cool, Mr. Even-Keel will tell the guys, “Look, you gotta win tonight, you gotta win tomorrow.  You gotta shoot the ball and take open shots.  It’s like any other time we play.”  Basically, don’t extrapolate out the narrowest margins and lowest error change-rate.  Instead think about how this should be an easy win against a team still trying to find their rudder and enjoying a back-to-back.  Advantages.  Like in anything, you don’t think about where you don’t want to be, you aim for where you should be.