Hornets Hype

And we have our first $#*tlisting of the 2008-09 season. Excellent.

I was warring with myself over what to do about the List. I said, “Self, it seems unfair that those who ended last season on our $#*tlist should be excused from their doings, just because it’s a fresh season.” And my self replied, “Well, but it should probably be a cumulative thing. Like start with one person/entity and sit back and watch it grow. That could be fun too. And those who have clearly not found it in their hearts to reform over the offseason can always be re-Listed. And it would be fun to ceremonially $#*tlist the first person, just to kick off the season.”

Well, as soon as I read the first sentence of this Mike Kahn article, I knew that person was here. It begins semi-offensively with,

If nothing else, social responsibility forces us to wish the best for the New Orleans Hornets.

Um, okay… Pat yourselves on the back for supporting poor old downtrodden New Orleans, America. Let’s just have a big round of self-congratulation right now. I guess we really guilt-tripped you and twisted your arm there, with our drowned houses and natural disaster and the greatest mass evacuation of a major American city that this country has ever seen. Gee, America, we don’t know what little ol’ us would do without you down here. (Actually, I have ideas about this. I think we should secede and take our oil with us. We could become our own tiny oil-producing, Mississippi River-controlling, shrimping republic, and we’d all be millionaires similar to the people in Kuwait… but I digress.)

Even in their first game back — the opener last year against the Sacramento Kings — there were thousands of empty seats. Indeed, a clause was negotiated into their lease by owner George Shinn that allows them to leave after this season if they average less than 14,735 through the first two seasons back, but if the support that unfolded in the final couple of weeks and during the playoffs is any indication, they may be in New Orleans for a lot longer than most people believe.

I’m getting this feeling of deja vu, like I’ve read this article somewhere before… I think you all know how I feel about this type of article, which I thought we could finally get away from this year, but I feel compelled to point out that New Orleans Arena sold out for the Grizzlies game, not exactly a marquee draw, on February 10th. So this would really make it the final couple of months of the regular season, not weeks, as Mr. Kahn writes. On one level, I sort of get it. You can’t write the feel-good article without rehashing the feel-bad. And the rest of the article is not that bad. But someone needs to tell Mike Kahn that he’s, like, six months late getting on this train.

But like their attendance, their roster doesn’t have a lot of depth.

Really. Because the fact that the Hornets drew 14,700 fans for a preseason game on a football Sunday seems to indicate to me that there’s just a little bit of depth. For comparison’s sake, they drew 13K in Miami, 12K in Anaheim (and that was the Lakers, not the Clippers!), and 10K in Houston. These are facts, commonly located in things called boxscores. You find them by looking them up.

Let us discuss another way in which attendance might be said to have depth (what does that mean anyway?). Last season the Jazz led the NBA in full season ticket sales with around 14,500. Only twelve teams out of thirty sold over 10,000 season tickets last year, and the last I heard, the Hornets are closer to 11,000. Keep in mind that, pre-Katrina, New Orleans was the second-smallest NBA market. Now it’s probably on the bottom, with even Memphis and OKC clocking in with more people. So I don’t know, selling over 10,000 season tickets seems to be a benchmark that people go for around the NBA and almost 2/3 of teams don’t reach. The fact that the smallest NBA market has managed to do this seems to indicate that people are pretty damn excited about this year’s team. And you know, a simple Google search yields this updated information. If I was writing that article, I would think, “Oh, how are the Hornets doing with tickets this year anyway?” instead of using facts seemingly copy/pasted out of an article from last year.

But hey, I guess this article is typical of the Fox News school of “fact”-based journalism. And for that offense, my friends, it sits lonely on the List, just waiting for more evil little NOLA-bashing friends to join it.

And by the way, Mr. Kahn, your title is stupid. The Hornets don’t have any laurels to rest on. People don’t wear laurels on their heads for making it to the second round of the playoffs. No. They get crowned for being champions.

But you know what? We’ll get back to you on that.