Bobcats 100, Timberwolves 95

Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m pretty giddy right now. This must be how my dog Lincoln feels whenever he’s outside and stumbles on a fresh pile of excrement. I don’t think I could be happier if grocery stores announced they were installing trap doors that were designed to strike anytime a customer in the Express 10-Items-or-Less line tries to write a check.

And for some extra sauce to go with my bucket of hot and crispy joy, last night's victory over the T-Wolves couldn’t have come against a better team. It’s no secret I despise Minnesota. I can’t stand Ricky Davis, I refuse to accept the possibility that Mark Blount might actually be a good player, I’m thrilled that moody Rashad McCants has underachieved even more than I’d hoped, I haven’t enjoyed anything by Marko Jaric since he played Bud on Married…With Children, I hate the fact that Minnesotans inexplicably love Mark Madsen even though he’s unskilled and quite obviously out of shape (and what’s the deal with this, by the way, because the same thing happens with Brian Scalabrine in Boston, and yet look at the reaction to Jerome James in New York? What’s different here? Hmmmm).

(Ironically, Kevin Garnett is actually one of my favorite players. This seems strange to me until I consider that one of my favorite baseball players of all time is Ted Williams, and likewise with Bobby Orr in hockey, and yet both played for my all-time nemesis of a city, Boston. So actually, with every Minnesota loss—even last night’s—and with every sight of KG at the end, walking off the court and looking slightly homicidal, I also feel a brief pang of sympathy. Minnesota, please trade him already, just so I don’t have to go through this duplicity every time!)

Anyway, the story of last night’s game was Adam Morrison—more specifically, Morrison in the second half, because in the first half it was Blount and KG shooting the lights out and putting the Bobcats down as many as 17. Mike James, whose skills are really only comparable to those of a fine hooker, also was all over the court. I don’t know what happened in the locker room at halftime, but apparently Blount gave Morrison some sort of skills-transplant, because Adam scored all of his 26 points in the second half and Blount went ice cold (James, meanwhile, was only about as good as a decent hooker the rest of the way). AM went 10-for-14 from the field, and hit 4-6 3-pointers. They were seriously just falling in from every which way; one clanged hard off the front of the rim yet managed to bounce backwards into the hoop, it was almost cartoon-ish.

I liked Charlotte Observer columnist Rick Bonnell’s description of the difference between Morrison pre- and post-All-Star Break. “Before the All-Star break,” Bonnell writes, “Morrison was a self-conscious, frustrated kid…he shot poorly and felt exhausted.” Bonnell goes onto say that over the break Morrison then got into the gym and worked on his shooting—nice, but Bonnell left out the part where Morrison gets bitten by a radioactive spider.

All in all, it was a great victory. In fact, our third win in a row has brought me the greatest dose of sports-related happiness (which often seems to be the only type of happiness I’m capable of feeling) since the Panthers beat the Ravens on the road last fall. So I guess before I go out and frolic naked in the field, genitals merrily swinging to and fro, I should just remember how the rest of that season worked out.