Because sometimes weird people get here by Googling weird stuff.

1. “how tall was Chris Paul in high school” - 6′5″. He shrunk.

2. “ceiling fan repair service” - This one always makes me laugh. Because I totally know why it happens. For those of you who haven’t seen it, here’s Tyson Chandler’s For Love or the Game. Of course his wife wins, because the teammate always says dumb stuff on these things and loses. In this particular video? The highlight is Jannero Pargo saying, with a perfectly straight face, if Tyson wasn’t in the NBA, he’d be a ceiling fan repair man.

3. “Peja’s hot wife” - Yeah. We know.

4.“James Posey girlfriend” - Ladies. We need to talk. Now, James Posey has been known to inspire man-crushes and crushes alike, because of his mad D and clutch 3. However. Do you really want to date this man? Really? Really? Aw, you know I love Posey. But he might… wait for it… be a little sketch.

5. “Hornets to Seattle.” - No.

I save this kind of stuff to take the edge off, you know, after the team blows a first half lead at home to another inferior First rule of Hornets slump: don’t talk about it. But if you’re a glutton for more punishment, or are interested in learning about this stuff, At the Hive breaks down some of last night’s defensive breakdowns with video. Wait… that didn’t sound right. Dammit, now MY GAME IS LAZY TOO. See what you’ve done.

Clearly there is nothing to hype.

After the defense was so horrific in the 4th quarter that the team went down by 8 to the Sacramento Kings’ backups, I performed the unspeakably douchey act of folding down the BELIEVES part on our THE BACK ROW BELIEVES banner.

So that pretty much sums it up.

"My advice to you... is to start drinking heavily."

Why, you ask?

Well, because Jim Eichenhofer of Hornets.com was right about what he told me last week: Melvin Ely’s first blog over on the official website 100% cannot be improved upon.

I’m not even gonna try. (Um, but the tooth story is not for the squeamish. I hope you ate already. Seriously.)

UPDATED 11/18: Tyson Chandler’s latest is pretty unforgettable too. He always makes me laugh. It’s entitled Looking for a Rhythm, but Not Looking There. The first part is about the Hornets’ play… the second part refers to childbirth, so you can pretty much guess what the THERE is about. He still hasn’t caught the bass in the canal in his backyard that’s kicking his ass though (which we heard about last time)…

T.C.’s blog is on NBA.com or on TysonChandler.com, in case you weren’t aware, and it cannot be missed.

Okay, the world is full of Survivor fans, and with all the discontent rumbling around the Hornets boards and blogs this seems to be the perfect time to ask the same questions here: who will be voted off the team? Should Posey replace Mo in the starting line-up? Should Peja be traded? Has Hilton progressed enough, and it seems like Mike James must be headed off the island right? What does the tribal council say?

Trick question. No one gets voted off. The starting line-up doesn’t change. This isn’t some anti-progressive Darwinian experiment where we encourage individuals to scratch and claw their way to the top no matter who they have to go through to get it. This isn’t some pseudo-free market rampage where top dollar rules all and you’d sell your mother to get your green. Those values are drama-driven and artificial cultural constructs, no matter how much we represent them as “natural.” Humans are creatures of collaboration. Our success is tied to our ability to work together efficiently. As the nineties’ Bulls. Ask the Spurs teams of the last ten years.

The Hornets are a team. When asked this year what the Celtics’ greatest asset was last year, Paul Pierce answered immediately: chemistry. Ask me why the Hornets were so great last year and will be this year? Chemistry. These guys know each other, work together well, and actually like each other. Do you really think CP starts yelling at Peja in practice for not hitting his shots in the game and then goes and yells at Jeff Bower for not trading him? No way. You think TC is telling Hilton he should stop trying to implement a spin and shoot move into his offensive arsenal, and calling George Shinn to figure out why his fourth year option was picked up, or is helping him work on that shot?

Too much of our culture is pessimistic, celebrating the demise of others. Misery loves company and all that. Or more accurately, they’re more miserable than me so I must be happy. Sorry not here. We’re all about the Hype. Basketball is a long season. We can’t just decry every missed shot and badly played game. Should we be disappointed? Sure. Despair? No way. Peja can miss every shot all game and I still have no problem with him taking a fadeway hand-in-your-face three at the buzzer. Our backups are progressing, and have done some things well some games, and other things well in other games. Give it all time to gel. The Bees could be ten games back from the 8th seed with ten games to go and I’d believe they could make it. So should you.

More importantly, despite their slow start, I believe they will win the division and be a top 3 seed. So should you.

What’s up, people of the blogs?

It’s been kind of a rough week, hard to be a mercenary killer when you’re not winning, ya know what I mean? So anyhow I wrote y’all some haikus:

Back off of CP
Overrated fools shoving
Purple rolls this time

Gotta shoot lights out
Peja, you need your swag back
Get it on from three

Damn right you know me
I am the Boba Fett of
The Western Conference

All loose balls are mine
No one likes a bullshit call
Technical foul shots

Red dudes rebounding
Da flow just won’t flow tonight
Sad week 4 insects

Advice from a champ:
To be the best you gotta
Live thru this, my friends

P.S. Hells yeah, they are proper haikus. I went to English class sometimes, k? Chick who sat next to me in that class was smokin, ya know what I mean? Uh-huh. You do.

(Read the first installment of the Real Diary of James Posey.)

Last night I was fuming mad at the calls in the Hornets-Lakers game. I thought the refs blew not just particular calls, but that their entire method to calling the game was flawed. Now before we go any further, I want to make it clear that the Lakers beat us. End of story. I’m not blaming the refs for the loss. But it occurred to me that it’s something I’ve seen before and just never knew how to describe it. Now I think I can.

There’s something called the Coase Theorem. It’s a theory that describes the efficiency of an economic allocation or outcome in the presence of externalities. This 1937 theory finally won the Nobel prize in 1991, and has a variety of applications, such as when Judge Learned Hand now-famously applied it to American tort law (e.g., negligence, personal injury, etc.). Basic tort law says that when someone is harmed, someone is the cause of that harm, and whosoever caused that harm must then make restitution for the aforementioned harm. Judge hand resolved this theory to the formula of B < PL, where B = the burden of adequate protection against foreseeable damages, P = the probability of damage occurring and L = the gravity of the resulting loss. The practical application of this formula, then, was to suggest to a company that if the cost of taking certain precautions was less than result of probability times the loss that might be incurred, the company was better off to settle out of court or pay the cost of lawsuits rather than to incur the cost of taking the precaution (think of the Edward Norton's auto recall example from Fight Club). The problem with this application to tort law came when certain scholars, like Richard Posner, believed that if a company made the “right” economic choice of not taking the precaution, then they were not even negligent for the harm that ensued. Yet the flaw in this interpretation was that the formula took into account the fact that the company would be held negligent. Thus, to not find that company negligent was rewarding them unjustly for making their products more dangerous to reap greater profits. You can see the controversy this caused.

Okay, you’re asking me. How the hell does this relate to basketball, let alone the call scheme of referees? Simple. Teams like the Lakers last night, like the Celtics last year, and the Spurs or Pistons since, well, ever employ stifling, in-your-face defense. They gameplan on trying to frustrate opposing players by getting in their grill, playing press defense, and making as much physical contact as the rules allow. Defense wins championships, right? Only there’s one problem, this maxim, as well as the maxim that basketball is a “contact sport,” equate physical contact as the norm, and the very reputation of being “tough” defensively means that refs expect that team to give the other team fits. As a consequence, the refs have little sympathy for the harshly defended player, because they believe that they can’t “take the game into their hands” and bail out that player when the other team is just defending well. Okay, you’re still saying, what’s the problem, right?

Well here’s the thing, when you play that kind of defense, when you are pressing, when you are swiping at the ball, when you are pressing bodies tight all night, you’re playing in a defensive gray zone: you’re trying to make as much contact possible without fouling. But by the very philosophy of such play, by the very proximity, you are bound to commit fouls. Just like CP gets burnt every now and then going for steals, so will any uber-physical defender eventually, and inevitably, commit a foul. This isn’t a game of perfection, but of percentages; you just can’t play that close and never foul. So s the problem is that the refs are afraid to make the call against these types of defenders, because they just assume they’re playing tough defense. It’s as if they are agreeing with Coase or Posner and saying that just because such teams figured out that the potential burden imposed by increased fouls is less than the probability of enough fouls to cost your team, THEY SHOULDN’T BE WHISTLED FOR FOULS THAT ARE FOULS, because they made the correct strategic choice.

I call bullshit. A foul is a foul. Whether’s it’s CP, Kobe, Chris Mihm, or Ryan Bowen. A hack is a hack. Whether you’re Bruce Bowen, Chauncey Billups, Allen Iverson, or Ricky Davis. A block is a block. Your superstar status shouldn’t matter. Your efficacy as a defensive unit shouldn’t matter. The best teams don’t foul because they don’t commit fouls, not because they play tough and are expected not to foul.

What really creates problems with execution of this Coase Corollary in NBA refereeing is the disparity it creates when one team is renowned for their defense and the other is not. So far this year, the Lakers’ defense had been lauded. The Hornets, not so much. So you get the problem where you get the Hornets getting signaled for regular fouls, which they, like any team, commit. But then, on the other end, you get a team getting away with fouls because B < PL, that is, they are a good defensive team, so we won’t reward the other team with fouls for not beating that defense themselves. Yet this creates an unbalanced game, where the referees are calling fouls on one team that they’re not calling on the other. The problem is compounded even more if one of the teams is known to pick up offensive fouls, which the Hornets are, and then you get the “defensive” team receiving the benefit of “offensive fouls” that aren’t there because their reputation as defenders says that otherwise the offensive player just couldn’t have made that move against such a tough defense without fouling.

So to sum up, what I’m saying is that tough defensive teams are allowed to get away with too many fouls based solely on their strategic choice to engage in aggressive defense and the perception of them as being good at doing so. As a result, their opponents face an unfair bias in how the games are called. Ever wonder why all the run and gun teams have trouble winning close games? It’s because all those “defense wins championship” teams foul them and never get called on it. Well, I’m calling you on it. Here. Now.

I love David West as much as the next person (shit, probably more than the next person), and it is true that he had a 21-12 night in a teeth-gritting loss to the Lakers… but. What’s an easy way to make people forget that? Oh, right, being responsible for more turnovers than any 3 players on either team added together.

I now present an illustration:

StarDestroyer Escape Pod Shooter Dude #1: There goes another one.

David West: Hold your fire. There’s no life forms. It must have short circuited.

Ineptitude… When you do your job perfectly all your life, and then drop the ball in those pesky clutch moments.

So the official Hornets site is going to be featuring new fan fave James Posey’s thoughts from time to time this season. I thought the first installment was kinda tame, although the accompanying pic is all kinds of awesome. But whatev. The real James Posey is blogging right here on Hornets Hype. Witness a day in the life of Poz…

8:10 AM. Outta bed. Sunny. Good morning, 504!

8:20 AM. Was driving home from the game Saturday night, listening to the postgame show, when this dude calls in and says, “I have a question for you, Joe. I think my girlfriend’s about to leave me for James Posey. He’s just that awesome. Do you have any advice?” I shoulda called in and told him, “Ain’t nothing can be done about that situation.” The ladies love me. I know how to hustle, ya know what I mean? Yeah, you do.

8:50 AM. My young man Juju called. Seems he read some shit about me possibly mentoring him, teach him some long-limbed defensive hustlin goodness. I said, go pick me up some breakfast and I’ll think about it. He asks, Do I want any coffee with that? But I tell him, No, son. Do I look like I need coffee? I wake up amazing. Still, I will instruct this young one in my ways. If it doesn’t go well, I can always kick him out of The Club. I was wearing tall socks when he was still in diapers. So I can always, ya know, hold that over his head.

9:20 AM. Ate bacon and champagne for breakfast.

11:56 PM. You will not believe this shit. This is what goes down in the locker room before practice today.

Me: So on the way here, I helped this old lady cross the street to get to the bus stop. She was real nice.

Chris: No way! That happened to me too. Plus I gave a homeless guy $500 on my way to City Hall to sit in on a meeting with Ray Nagin about the city’s crime problem.

Me: ………

The hell. That goody two-shoes. No one out-Poseys James Posey. Gonna have to watch this one carefully…

12:42 PM. Hit 200 threes in practice. They were all clutch.

2:50 PM. Uploaded pics from Halloween to MySpace. Partied on Bourbon Street with the fellas. I went as me. Self-explanatory.

3:35 PM. Hate off days. No one to dominate. I once went 12 hours without blinking, on an off day. Just because I can.

5:40 PM. Paul texted me. Said he missed my hug before the game last night. Texted him back and told him sorry, you know my hugs cost $5.5 mil a year. That’s just business. Haha. Then decided that was too mean and texted him a smiley. I ain’t running a charity operation here. Just kidding. I’m a good dude. I once stole Kobe’s sandwich, but I put it back.

6:23 PM. Dude on Canal Street asked me where I got my shoes. Beat that scamming motherf@cker up, and then told him, “In yo ass.”

8:45 PM. There was a spider above my TV, up on the wall. Was v. distracting. Stared at it until it burst into a teeny flame, sizzled, and died.

10:05 PM. Took relaxing shower. Sang. No, I won’t tell you what.

11:06 PM. Lake Show better watch out on Weds, is all I’m gonna say. Can’t outhustle a hustler. Been 4 months but they still wake up in the middle of the night, all sweaty, seeing a dark shadow looming over them, lunging for their souls, or maybe a loose ball. That shadow is me.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for. So maybe you have to special order yellow and turquoise striped mouthguards… That’s all right. I forgive you, Pose. At least you have the proper colors on now. Better 5 4 games in than never! (OK, it has been brought to my attention he wore it on Wednesday, but we were 25 rows up and couldn’t see.)

Hmm, in other notes, stuff on the butt of uniforms must be the new style. Even that Bobcat has a little Charlotte on the ass of his shorts.

Not content to convince America that Chris Paul and the rest of Hornets are the greatest thing since electricity, we’re trying to spread the Hype across the world. Or at least linking to those that do. You’ll notice we added an “All Hornets International” blogroll to our sidebar. So far, we’ve found German and Chinese sites dedicated to the Hornets and/or its players. So if anyone else knows any other great international sites dedicated to the same, let us know! We’ll add them to our links.

Also, if any of you can translate any of the languages on these sites for us non-speakers, we’ll be glad to re-post cool excerpts from those sites here, link to the original post, and credit you for the translation! Maybe this will help open an international dialogue about the greatness of our team.

¡Vivan los Hornets!