76ers 92, Bobcats 83

Who says the Bobcats and the 76ers are among the worst teams in the league? I do, after watching last night’s fiasco between them. In general, it was an atrocity of a game, almost like a Suck Relay Race: each team took a Suck Lap then passed the Suck Baton off to the other. The Bobcats ran the first leg of the Suck-a-thon by playing a horrendous 1st quarter that saw them trail by as many as 17 points. Then it was Philly’s turn to suck, as we cut the deficit to 6. Then it was our turn again, as we fell behind 20, and so on and so forth until the Tour de Suck finally ended with a 9-point loss to a team that’s so bad, it’s already locked up 3 first round draft picks. It was a Suck-fest. It was Suck-stock.

Geez, did Coach Bickerstaff force the team to put on adult diapers and drive the whole way up to Philly non-stop? He must have—how else do you explain why they played that badly? It’s hard even describing how bad we were—it’s like trying to describe the size of the universe; Carl Sagan would have difficulty describing how bad we sucked. The statistics don’t bear it out either. Sure, I could say that the team only shot 27% from the field in the first quarter (eventually climbing “all the way” to 44%), but they’ve done worse than that before (in fact, they probably did it last game), so I don’t know. The team was just bad. They were voo-doo bad, like someone was sticking pins in little dolls of Adam Morrison and Raymond Felton, causing them to combine for 8 turnovers. Who was this master of puppets, pulling our strings? I don't know, but has anyone seen Adrian Branch lately?

More disturbingly, we seemed to abandon all efforts to win. Gerald Wallace and Emeka Okafor only played about 30 minutes—what, are we saving them for the playoffs or something? In the fourth quarter, with the game still pathetically winnable, we tried coming back with Melvin Ely, Walter Herrmann, and Primoz Brezec all on the floor at the same time—MC Hammer has a better chance of coming back than that group. The benign explanation is that the team was being punished. The more cynical explanation, however, is that at halftime we officially threw our hats into the Greg Oden/Kevin Durant Sweepstakes.

I don’t know about you, but I sure hope not. I know, I know, this year’s draft picks are Can’t Miss. The only small problem with that theory, though, is that it’s completely insane. First of all, they’re not “Can’t Miss,” they’re “Quite Easily Missed,” because there’s no guarantee that you get them—it’s called a Draft Lottery for a reason. Second, they can completely flame out, and instead of being the Next Michael Jordan, they become the next Michael Olowokandi. Third, even if either of them becomes the Next LeBron James, how exactly has that worked out for Cleveland? Four years later, and the most the Cavs have to show for their '02-03 tank job is the 2nd round of the playoffs of a lousy conference.

I’m sure I’m just being paranoid. Coach Bickerstaff would never tank a game, and things aren’t that bad. Actually, look what happened after we lost to the Bucks a few weeks back: if that game wasn’t a signal to hang it up for the season, I don’t know what is, and we played some of our best ball ever after that debacle. And we haven’t been all that disappointing either. In fact, John Hollinger at ESPN.com produced a Top 15 Most Disappointing List for this year, and not a single Bobcat is on it—on the other hand, I question the validity of any “Most Disappointing” list that only features one LA Clipper...