Bobcats Not Keeping it Brevin, Waive Goodbye to BK

This was probably a year too late, but then again I didn’t think they were ever going to do it, so maybe I should think of it as infinitely early. The Bobcats bought out one of our originals, feisty point guard Brevin Knight. Knight was a personal favorite of mine for his ruggedness and his utterly unimaginative swearing (I can recall at least three separate incidents in which he was fouled hard on a drive, after which the camera picked him up telling an opposing player, “F---ing f--- you, mutherf---er!”). But the guy just could not stay healthy. He hasn’t played 70 games a year since his rookie season, and the last 6 years he’s appeared in just 45, 69, 66, 32, 24, and 55 contests.

This leaves me with two questions: a) who’s his replacement going to be, and b) why didn’t management get a PG from the draft at the 22nd pick instead of Jared Dudley? At the time, Aaron Brooks and Gabe Pruitt were still available, as was that Koponen dude from Finland. Heck, I think even JamesOn Curry would have been decent, at least as a backup. The timing on this one was weird, but then again, MJ and the boys suddenly seem empowered. “I think we’ve got a great makeup and a chance to make noise in the East,” Jordan told the Observer this morning, “That’s what a Jason Richardson brings.” Yup, it’s certainly what this Jason Richardson brings—any time MJ starts using proper nouns like pronouns, you know he’s feeling good about life.

So who do we get now? Depending on how much Gerald Wallace demands with his new contract, we might be able to lure in Chauncey Billups or Mo Williams. Or how about Mike Bibby, especially if we can sucker the Kings into going for Sean “Kneeless” May and one of the Hansons? As much as an atrocity it would be to have to cheer for Bibby, because we didn’t draft Joakim Noah, I feel like I could deal with it. I also see Daniel Ewing just got his pink slip from the Clippers, and Jordan’s probably lost more in a poker all-nighter than it would take to sign him.

Totally unrelated side note: last night I was cruising Chapel Hill, and I saw this beat up old car with a vanity license plate that read “SABBATH.” So when I pulled up alongside, I jokingly gave the driver the devil horns and shouted “Ozzy rules!” Bad move. First of all, there was, like, a family of five in the car, not some bearded dude in a trucker hat and a Judas Priest t-shirt like I expected. There were also all these crucifix stickers on one of the side doors and even a Bible facing the back window that I didn’t notice the first time. All too late I realized the license plate meant “Sabbath” as in, “On the 7th day, the Lord rested,” and NOT as in, “'War Pigs' is one of Black Sabbath’s greatest songs, and it’s too bad Ozzy left them in order to snort lines of ants.”

It’s weird, that whole metal/religious overlap. Chuck Klosterman once observed that some of the subtitles of the popular religious fiction Left Behind series would have made some stellar metal album titles (e.g., “The Destroyer is Unleashed” and “The Beast Takes Possession”). And then you have songs like “Creeping Death” by Metallica, which is really just a retelling of the story of Passover. Anyway, lesson learned; I won’t automatically assume like that again…