Now, some of the problems have been basketball-related. Peja’s huge contract started to surpass his productivity as age took its toll. A number of young players didn’t pan out, especially Hilton Armstrong and Julian Wright. This stuff happens. But what really sucked is seeing George Shinn be a total cheapskate, with salary dumping becoming the number one priority. In December 2008 they tried and failed to dump Tyson Chandler’s contract. After the 2008-09 season they did in fact deal Chandler, picking up Emeka Okafor, who was making slightly less but had a longer contract. In basketball terms it seemed like a reasonable move: a more polished offensive player instead of Chandler’s raw athleticism. Unfortunately, the trade didn’t seem to work out for either side: Chandler played in just 51 games for Charlotte and Okafor’s production dropped to 10 points and 9 boards a game—hardly dreadful, but not much for someone making $10.5 million a year.

Then the Hornets dumped Rasual Butler—one of the bright spots in the 08-09 season—for a 2016 second-round draft pick. What the fuck is that shit? I realize we had just gotten some young guards in the draft (Thornton and Collison), but this was a blatant salary dump, pure and simple. They did almost nothing to improve the roster. They tried to bolster their backup frontcourt—the biggest shortcoming in the 2008 playoffs—by picking up Darius Songaila and Ike Diogu. Songaila proved a useful addition, but Diogu missed the whole season with injuries. They dumped Hilton Armstrong—not that I blame them—for another 2016 draft pick. Then they dealt Bobby Brown for yet another draft pick. The number one concern was obviously with avoiding the luxury tax, with little regard for improving the basketball team.

Now, at this point you may be confused if you don’t know about the byzantine workings of the NBA’s salary cap. It’s complicated. If you’re an NFL fan, things are simple (well, they were simple until this year became an uncapped year due to the failure of the owners and players to agree to an extension of the collective bargaining agreement…but that’s beside the point). The NFL has a hard cap. There’s no going over. There’s also a floor to keep teams from sitting on their money (the floor was roughly 85-90% of the cap). So there’s really not a lot of chances to separate the cheap NFL owners from the Dan Snyders and Jerry Joneses.

In the NBA, however, things are a lot different. They wanted to avoid a situation where a team might have to give up a superstar simply because they have no cap space left. Hence the so-called “Bird exception.” It lets a team go over the salary cap to retain one of their own free agents. (It also lets a team sign a player who is traded to them, which is one of the reasons why sign-and-trades are so popular.) There are also a number of exceptions to the NBA’s salary cap; you can read about them (and everything else you could possibly want to know about the NBA salary cap) at Larry Coon’s mind-blowingly awesome NBA Salary Cap FAQ.

The point is that a sufficiently motivated team has a lot of wiggle room to spend a lot of money. But if they do that, they are punished with a dollar-for-dollar tax for the money they spend over the luxury tax threshold (which is higher than the salary cap itself). Now, things certainly aren’t as bad as they are in Major League Baseball, where the Yankees can spend more than $200 million while the Pirates and Padres spend less than $40 million. But there are clearly haves and have-nots. Actually, fuck that. We’re talking about billionaires, so we’re not taling about haves and have-nots, we’re talking about “people who go all-out to win” and “notorious fucking cheapskates who would rather dump salary than try to build a winner.” George Shinn is in the latter category.

And can I blame CP3 for not wanting to play for this guy? Nope. He was probably upset to see Byron Scott go, but that’s a defensible basketball move after the team’s disappointing first round trouncing in the 2009 playoffs. He was probably upset to see Tyson Chandler go; the two seemed to get along well and their alley-oops—the so-called Crescent City Connection—were always highlight reel material. But again, another defensible basketball move.

What isn’t defensible is not giving a shit. There were tons of big-name free agents on the market this offseason, but the Hornets made no efforts whatsoever at getting any good players. As I’ve said already, I realize the Hornets weren’t going to nab LeBron, but they didn’t do anything. (Okay, they signed Luther Head. Who the fuck is Luther Head? A 2 guard with a career average of 8.5 points per game. Whoop-de-fucking-doo.)

Shit like this is what makes me glad I’m a NFL fan, where you have to be mentally ill (Al Davis) or totally incompetent (Matt Millen) to run a franchise into the ground. You can’t do it by being cheap. (Also, I pray that the NFL owners and players get their shit together and sign a CBA to head off any strike or lockout in 2011. Seriously, you should be praying too about this. They better not fuck this up.)

To be perfectly honest, if CP3 leaves, I really don’t give a shit what happens to the Hornets. I can’t see them on TV, I usually get slammed by ticketmaster fees if I want to see their games, and now one of the most thrilling athletes of his generation is set to pack his bags because his owner can’t be bothered to put together a winning team. Fuck it. If CP3 is gone, I may very well buy a jersey of him on his new team and get NBA League Pass so that I can watch him. But will I call myself a Hornets fan anymore? I doubt it. Maybe if Gary Chouest takes over the team and spends some money I’ll change my mind. But if he wants to spend money, wouldn’t he have worked out the deal by now? I’m growing more and more concerned. Oh well.

As you might expect, LeBron’s decision led to a great deal of turmoil in the cities he rejected, most of all Cleveland. And the apoplexy even came straight from the top: consider this incredible letter from the Cavs’ majority owner, Dan Gilbert.* Some choice excerpts: “cowardly betrayal”; “shameful display of selfishness and betrayal”; “shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown ‘chosen one’”; “heartless and callous action.” And my personal favorite: “Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there.” What?

If you go traipsing through the Internet, you’ll find plenty of other pissed-off Cavaliers fans. (This post is pretty entertaining.) Sure, it sucks to lose the best player in the league—a native son from just down the Cuyahoga River in Akron. Sure, it sucks to look at your roster and realize that you have no hope of winning anything any time soon. Sure, it sucks that none of the big-name free agents wanted to join LeBron in your Rust Belt town. But shit happens. It certainly doesn’t compare with Art Modell taking the Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore.

The bottom line of sports is this, as so eloquently put by that bard of the gridiron, Herm Edwards: “You play to win the game.” LeBron is attempting to do just that. Perhaps the sunny weather and lack of a state income tax sealed the deal for Miami, and there was no hope of LeBron ever getting D-Wade or any other superstar to join in. In the NBA, one man can’t win a title. He needed another star, and no, Mo Williams doesn’t count. He ended up getting two (even if Chris Bosh is somewhat overrated).

I must admit that I missed the ESPN special where LeBron announced his decision; and I certainly respect the fact that people were upset that he chose to leave the Cavs in such a high-profile fashion. In his defense, he raised a couple million dollars for the Boys and Girls Clubs, so he can say he had a good motive. Maybe that makes up for it, maybe not. At best, it’s both charitable and narcissistic; at worst, it’s the move of an egomaniac.

But is LeBron an egomaniac? Off the court, maybe. On the court, no. His assist totals dwarf Kobe’s. He has a legitimate shot of averaging a triple-double. He’s apparently a fantastic teammate. And he seems to want titles, and want them desperately. And he, Wade, and Bosh were obviously on the same page in terms of where they’d end up.

Also, I find it ridiculous that the vitriol is even greater because of LeBron’s Ohio background. The Cavs either lucked—or tanked?—their way into drafting him; there was a 77.5% chance they didn’t end up with the first pick. They quite easily could have never had LeBron, so I don’t see why this should matter.

Finally, I really don’t get why people from outside of Cleveland are upset. Sure, Bulls or Knicks fans would’ve loved to have LeBron; shit, he and CP3 are apparently pretty good buddies and I’d piss myself seeing them play together for the Hornets. But that was never gonna happen. I have to say that as a basketball fan I’m excited to see what will happen with the Heat, and I’m sure that once the season starts everyone will be watching. And that’s the great thing about sports—the Heat are now world-beaters on paper, but who knows what will actually happen?

* I had missed this since I saw it on ESPN’s website and not the official Cavs site, but note the font: Comic Sans. Obviously NPR took that angle in discussing the story. Speaking of which—one of these days I’m going to write about how much I hate it when NPR tries to cover sports.

Over the decades the tournament gradually expanded; at first, only conference champions were allowed into the tourney. In 1975 at-large teams were added, and the tournament grew to 32 teams, then 40, then 48, and eventually 64. Now it’s at 65 with a largely irrelevant play-in game. 64 was perfect. No byes, no play-in games, just a perfectly balanced bracket. A few years ago they added a 65th team. The rationale at the time was that the NCAA had just gotten another conference (and thus another automatic bid), so expanding the tournament by one would keep the same number of at-large teams. Which is okay, I suppose. All it does is put an extra at-large team somewhere around the 11-12 seeds and bump the champions of the tiny conferences down a spot, putting the worst of them into the play-in game.

Now some people are calling for an expansion of the field to 96 teams. There are a number of arguments in favor of this, some better than others. The number one reason it will likely happen sooner or later is money. The tournament is the NCAA’s cash cow. In 1999, CBS signed an 11-year, $6 billion contract extension with the NCAA. That’s a lot of cash. And with that contract ending soon (2013), and the NCAA having an opt-out clause after this season, they may very well feel that more games (i.e. more chances for networks to sell commercials) could increase their revenues. There’s the possibility of a bidding war between CBS and ESPN, so it’d make sense to expand now instead of in the middle of a contract.

Needless to say, while money may rule collegiate athletics, supporters of expansion are going to have to come up with some reasons why expansion is a good idea. One argument is that Division I basketball has been steadily expanding; in comparison to many other college and pro leagues, only a tiny percentage of schools make the postseason. There’s some validity in this argument, true; but a new team isn’t going to have any shot of competing for a title for years, while a pro team could very easily make the playoffs or win a championship within a few years of its inception. And why should there be more spots for crappy teams from the big conferences just because some minnows have moved up to D-I? I really don’t think teams like North Carolina Central, Houston Baptist, Florida Gulf Coast, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, the University of South Carolina Upstate, and California State University-Bakersfield should be the driving factors in expanding the tournament.*

Most of the good arguments in favor of expansion focus on the entertainment value of the tournament. Sure, only a handful of teams have any realistic hope of winning it all, but it’s just so much fun to watch! And there’s something to be said for this. Expansion would mean another round of games, two more weekdays jam-packed with wall-to-wall basketball, bouncing around from site to site looking for great finishes and huge upsets. And it’d mean more games to guess at when filling out your brackets. As a fan, I can buy this argument. But unfortunately, there’s a downside.

Of all the major American sports, college basketball undoubtedly has the dullest regular season. A power conference team plays a few good teams early on, then loads up on cupcakes, then goes 8-8 in conference and ends up with a ten seed. Sure, a team can collapse completely (*cough* UCONN and UNC *cough*), but you’ve gotta screw up bigtime to miss out. If the tournament expands to 96 teams, it’s quite possible that the ACC or Big East could get almost every single team in. I saw one prediction a month or two ago where a 96-team field would have 11 of the 12 ACC teams and 13 of the 16 Big East teams. Now, would those teams deserve a spot? Well, surely a great many of them would be among the top 60 or so at-large schools, so in that respect, yes. But should a team that schedules a bunch of pansies out of conference, rips through them with a 12-0 record, then goes 3-13 in conference play and loses a game in its conference tourney to end up 15-14 really be playing postseason basketball? I doubt it. I’m sure the NCAA would keep its rule that a team has to finish .500 or better to qualify as an at-large team, but a 96-team tournament would almost certainly let in a lot of teams who are barely above that mark. I don’t want to make this into a big guy vs. little guy debate, because surely a bunch more mid-major teams would get into a 96-team field, but tournament expansion is really going to help the power schools who have terrible seasons—their in-conference strength of schedule would help them tremendously, and they’d probably have knocked off a couple of good teams in the course of their season. Surely a team like Connecticut would make a 96-team field, but should the 12th best team in a conference make it in? I don’t think so. And expansion would encourage the power-conference schools to play the worst teams they can find, since having a .500 record would almost guarantee them a postseason berth. So they’d be less willing to play the Butlers and Gonzagas of the world—there would be nothing for the big schools to gain. At least now a team has to make some attempt to buck up its RPI with games against respectable out-of-conference opponents. The major change is that instead of a good RPI or strength of schedule being the key factor in deciding which bubble teams make it in, the key factor would be having a .500 record. Bad, bad, bad idea.

Now, the current dullness of college basketball’s regular season isn’t really due to the playoff format. (Although, the big conference tournaments would be much more exciting if the NCAA got rid of at-large bids. I’d say I watched an even split of big conference tournament games and mid-major title games, and the excitement of the crowds and players is clearly a lot greater when a tournament berth is at stake, as opposed to just moving up or down a seed line or two.) College basketball has a number of problems—the one and done rule, the possibility of more players pulling a Brandon Jennings and going to Europe instead of putting up with the NBA’s farcical draft rules, corruption behind the scenes, academic scandals, and so on. And on a personal level, the fact that my two favorite teams (LSU and Tulane) had dismal seasons didn’t help matters. But one of the major problems is the fact that a team can lose ten or twelve games and still make it to the postseason. In other words, the stakes in any particular game just aren’t high enough. Contrast this with the regular season of college football. One loss can destroy you, so there’s a lot at stake in each individual game. Sure, I enjoy watching college basketball, even during the regular season. But I have so little reason to care about any particular game, so little reason to make anything appointment viewing. Some of that is a result of good trends in the game; it seems like there are far more quality out-of-conference games than there were ten years ago, so a matchup of big-name schools early in the season isn’t the surprise it once was. But the landscape has become so scattered; it’s hard to know who’s worth watching and who isn’t. So I end up watching network TV or an NBA game instead. Expansion of the tournament wouldn’t solve the game’s problems—and neither will staying at 65 teams—but I think it would exacerbate the insignificance of the regular season.

Again I admit that expansion would be entertaining, and yes, it would mean a lot more money. But I think the price is too high, especially the way in which it would encourage teams to play weaker schedules.

(*My apologies to any alumni of those institutions of higher learning, which I’m sure are perfectly fine and decent schools. But good luck making it to the Big Dance any time in the next 20 years.)

When the Hornets came, I wasn’t all that excited at first. I’d watch the occasional game on TV, but didn’t pay too much attention. Then in 2003 I moved to a new house and got DirecTV, which didn’t have (and still doesn’t have) Cox Sports TV, so I couldn’t watch Hornets games aside from the occasional nationally televised game. But then the Hornets got Chris Paul and returned to New Orleans full-time after a Katrina-induced exile to Oklahoma City. And they started winning. I had to been to a Hornets game once before (2004, maybe?) when my dad got some tickets from a work colleague. But I didn’t go again until I decided to go in March 2008, when the red-hot Hornets were fighting for the #1 spot in the Western Conference. They were playing the Bulls and entered the 4th quarter down by nine, but came back to win by eleven. Chris Paul had 37 points and 13 assists. I didn’t start attending every home game or anything like that, but clearly the NBA and the Hornets had some appeal.

They had enough appeal that I bought a ticket for the first game of their playoff series against the Spurs that year. I paid something like $55 for a seat in the lower bowl behind the basket. A little bit steep, but nothing too bad for a game every once in a while. This was, as you may recall, the game in which the Hornets’ mascot jumped through a ring of fire. Unfortunately, the fire was difficult to extinguish, and the contents of the various fire extinguishers ended up all over the arena floor, leading to a lengthy delay. In any case, the Hornets won that game, but ended up losing the series 4-3 to San Antonio. When the season was over, I was disappointed, mostly because it had been a lot of fun to turn on the TV and watch Chris Paul play. There were the alley-oops to Tyson Chandler, the dribble-drives and lay-ups through a forest of much taller players, the behind-the-back dribbles; CP3 plays in a way that is not only effective but also aesthetically delightful. I wasn’t distraught in the way I would be after the end of an unsuccessful Saints season; Hornets basketball wasn’t and isn’t a matter of life and death for me, but when they’re playing well it’s a fun diversion.

Of course, I’d been able to watch those playoff games because they were on TNT or ESPN or ABC. Once the Hornets resumed play in the fall of 2008, I was out of luck once again. There was no way I was giving up DirecTV, but it sure was frustrating that I couldn’t watch the Hornets. Now, it’s not quite as upsetting right now since CP3 is still out with an injury and the Hornets are on the outside of the playoffs looking in, but it’s inexplicable that Cox and DirecTV can’t work out a deal. At first I figured Cox wanted to keep its cable channel away from satellite companies and rival cable operators, but they agreed on a deal with Dish Network. Presumably it’s a matter of money, and surely if they were asked Cox would blame DirecTV and DirecTV would blame Cox, but who’s the real loser here? The devout fans will switch to Cox or Dish just for the Hornets, so they’re inconvenienced, but they’re not missing out. The casual fan (people like me) will get on with their lives.

The real loser? The Hornets. They’re struggling a bit, but they have a really great product. Chris Paul may be sidelined, but backup point guard Darren Collison has been having a stellar rookie season. His fellow rookie, Marcus Thornton (the former LSU standout), has been scoring points in bunches of late. Peja may be old and overpaid, but he can still go on 3-point barrages with surprising frequency. And there’s David West, the power forward with a stellar midrange game. It’s a fun team to watch, and the Hornets have managed to dump salary without ruining their team, a pretty good accomplishment in today’s NBA. But I wouldn’t have known they were any good had I not gone to a game or caught the occasional nationally televised one. But a casual fan with DirecTV—and I see plenty of dishes throughout the city and metro area—isn’t going to see any Hornets games, and isn’t going to realize how much fun the team is to watch and how entertaining the games are in person.

And off the court, the Hornets do a great job. Bands play outside the arena before games, with $1 beers and cheap hot dogs for sale. During the game there are acrobatic slam dunks off trampolines, bizarre halftime entertainment (contortionists, escape artists, plate spinners, you name it), a plethora of dance teams (with everyone from little kids to old ladies), t-shirt cannons and slingshots, free programs, and so on. It’s so different from a Saints game; the Saints know how football-crazed we are, and that we’re gonna show up know matter what. The Hornets actually have to work for an audience, and it shows. There’s enough going on at a Hornets game to draw in a casual fan—or even someone who doesn’t care for basketball at all. On the other hand, attending an NFL game would three hours of boredom and torture for those perverse souls who don’t enjoy football. (Supposedly these people exist, although in New Orleans they’ve gone into hiding. I don’t understand them at all, but apparently they exist.) But you could hate basketball (or at least know nothing about it) and enjoy a Hornets game.

Now, before I finish I guess I should address the argument that if people can see the Hornets on TV, why would they go to the games? (There’s no blackout rule like in the NFL.) Well, anecdotally speaking, I don’t have the Hornets on TV and I don’t go to all that many games; I’ve been to two so far this year, and I’ll try to go to one or two more once CP3 is playing again. So not being able to watch the Hornets isn’t driving me to the New Orleans Arena every single night. I think the benefit of free advertising outweighs the drawback of a freely available televised product, which means that the Hornets should be more involved in forcing DirecTV and Cox to reach an agreement. Obviously, the Hornets aren’t directly involved, but they have a lot to gain. And yes, I understand that it’s a business, and apparently DirecTV and Cox aren’t really interested, but it’s a bit ridiculous that they haven’t worked something out.