Hornets Hype

D West: For the love of god, if you lose Anthony Morrow one more time I am going to come over there and kick your ass. I’ma slap you in the face like Dirk.

Pose: But–

D West: Shut up, Pose. Man, what is up with you this month? You give away and-1s like they’re candy. Defensive stopper my ass. And what happened to your three?

Pose: I just hit a three. It was a big one.

D West:  You have made 6 field goals in the last ten games.

Pose: That can’t be true. Total?

D West: Total. Let us not forget how you only played 10 minutes against Memphis and managed to rack up five fouls and lose the game in the last 7 seconds.

Pose: Aren’t you guys over that? It was last week.

D West: No one is over that. Back me up here, Darius.

Songaila: No one is over that.

D West: Marcus?

Marcus: Were yall talking? ‘Cause all this talking is getting in the way of me scoring.

Hornets Hype: Specializing in Awkward Situations Since 2007

Oh, you thought I was gonna post about the game? Nah. The Hornets won. ‘Cause they were at home (12-3). It was good times.

Festive, aren't they?

In lieu of actual Hornets content, I felt I had to share this with you. I didn’t make it. @BringEmOut02 did. But it is indeed great. The Peja elf in particular looks like he really loves being in that outfit…

Click here to enjoy all the holiday goodness.

P.S. I saw what you did there, putting Marcus Thornton elf in with the starters instead of Devin Brown elf…

James Posey: OMG Chris. You know what could make us best friends MORE THAN EVER this season?

Chris Paul: What?

James Posey: MATCHING MOUTH GUARDS!

Great NBA Moments in Bromance & Matching Accessories

• ESPN’s Daily Dime – the usual. Except everyone seems to be mentioning that he smacked/kicked/whatever Al Harrington. Hello, that’s probably more a result of Harrington grabbing Chris around the leg than it is indicative of some deep, secret, frustrated desire to be out of New Orleans.
• At the Hive talks about Byron Scott’s lack of adjustments over the past two years and how this does not bode well for the future.
• Paul’s Frustration Grows, Even as he Hides It – Hornets are a mom and pop organization, Shinn is a liar for claiming credit for coming back after Katrina (we knew this), maybe Paul should start holding them to higher standards as a franchise player like Kobe and LeBron do.
• Dime: Chris Paul has lost his smile
• Frustration, losses mounting for Hornets’ Paul – Ken Berger has been a perennial Shit List resident in the past because of stupid factual errors, but I have to say I agree with him and his column is probably the best of the lot. No, not just ’cause he hit all  my major gripes and agreed with me. Well, maybe a little bit because of that…

“One of the best potential recipients of Paul’s assists, rookie Marcus Thornton, languishes on the bench because Byron Scott wants the team to defend first and score later. At this rate, though, there won’t be a later.

…On one hand, Paul says things will be fine — “It’s a long season,” he said — and in his next breath he laments that the Hornets are a team without a style. That’s code for “team with a stubborn coach.” Scott wants a rugged, defense-obsessed, insanely conditioned team. He wants this all the time, with no exceptions. But if a week goes by, and then a month, and it’s not working, he’ll have to try something else or he will lose the team”

I don’t know. Maybe I’ll come back later and add some commentary, but for now I’m not going to. Peja was on from deep, West and Okafor had 21+ points apiece, and CP had 32. We lost last night because our interior defense and teamwork was horrendously, eye-searingly awful, not because “ha ha the Hornets suck, who’s gonna score for them?” like a lot of the mainstream sources seem to think. It was already bad enough that New Orleans does a poor job of defending the three, but it was infinitely more excusable than allowing junky teams to get layup after layup. 4o points in the 4th quarter to the Knicks? And this is not the Bobby Browns of the team. (Well, it’s that too.) It’s the starting lineup.

Chris Paul wasn’t exchanging words with Tom Thibodeau the other night because he was pissed at Rondo. He was probably trying to smuggle him on the freaking plane.

The heartless staff of Hornets.com have posted on YouTube the video evidence of the rookie humiliation that went down at Saturday’s open practice in Lafayette. Darren Collison totally did the best job, but the video of Marcus Thornton is the funniest, because D West and JuJu jump in the middle and start doing the beat– causing the rookie to stop and turn around like, “All right, who the **** is doing that?” Also featuring Darren Collison and Guy With the Braids Who Isn’t Going to Make the Team (now I feel mean about being too lazy to go and look up who he is– OK, the guilt was too much: Larry Owens), who come and help him finish up the song, James Posey MCing, Peja doing something vaguely mocking in the background, and Ike Diogu looking completely unamused. It’s sort of heart-warming… well, as heart-warming as a bunch of huge 30-ish dudes torturing college kids who can’t carry a tune can be, anyway.

Collison:

Thornton:

Only tangentially Hornets-related, but for those who aren’t into the whole Twitter thing, I got what is pretty much the Twitter Holy Grail this afternoon: a rare and coveted @ reply from His Shaqness. I had originally posted a link to this article by Jimmy Smith of the Times Picayune:

POSEY PLAYED HURT: No one knew it, but Hornets forward James Posey played all but the first two games of last season with torn meniscus cartilage in his right knee. Posey, who underwent surgery to repair the damage in late May, recalled Monday when and where the injury took place.

“In Game 3 here (a home opener against the Cleveland Cavaliers), I came down, had a couple shots – and I was on that left wing,” Posey said, pointing to the end of the floor where the Hornets’ bench is located. “I was fouled, but I thought I was going to have more contact – and I came down awkward.

“My knee buckled. I went to the free-throw line, then I started moving, and then I subbed myself out. I went straight to the back, and I just sat in the hallway. It just didn’t feel right. The docs came back and checked it out. Afterward I had an MRI, and they told me what happened.”

Posey said doctors assured him he would do no additional damage to the knee by playing. So he taped it up and padded it each contest – for 72 more regular-season games and five in the playoffs – and continued to play.

And all this time we never knew. It wasn’t in the paper. It wasn’t on TV. It wasn’t out there. Which basically affirms my view of Posey as a warrior. Therefore, I tweeted the following:

A little bit later, I check my @ replies. To my complete surprise, out of nowhere, I see this in my feed! (Red arrow is Shaq, above which is an amusing glimpse at several people reacting to Shaq randomly @ replying me, in pretty much the same way I reacted.)

So there you go. Shaq agrees with me. Ha! If Twitter were life, I would win at it. But more seriously, I think that says something about what kind of a player Pose is. We’re lucky to have him.

Alas, where does one go from here? I am so young, with nothing left to live for.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that this year’s draft sucks and the Hornets will not pick up anyone helpful with the 21st pick. Or at least, so everyone says.

In the interest of curiosity, and good ol’ draft week fun, I put the 2008-09 Hornets roster into draft order. Snarky commentary will be provided below.

1. Tyson Chandler……… 2
2. Chris Paul…………….. 4
3. Antonio Daniels……… 4
4. Melvin Ely……………. 12
5. Hilton Armstrong….. 12
6. Julian Wright………… 13
7. Peja Stojakovic……. 14
8. David West…………. 18
9. James Posey………… 18
10. Morris Peterson……. 21
11. Sean Marks…………. 44
12. Rasual Butler……….. 52
13. Ryan Bowen………….55
14. Devin Brown……….. N/A

Some thoughts that leap immediately to mind based on the above list:

Both the Hornets point guards were #4 picks. Tyson Chandler should be the best guy on the team based on the draft, but his PER makes him roughly the third best guy on the team, so that’s not that big a difference. If he was healthy. All the people who are like, “Let’s draft a big! On potential!” should learn from the placement of Hilton Armstrong and Melvin Ely, who were both picked at #12 and yet managed to suck way more than the next eight guys below them. I dunno, maybe #12 is the pick of death or something. Sorry, Charlotte. Peja being drafted at 14 seems like kind of a steal, but that was a really deep draft, and you can’t really blame the teams who passed over him for the likes of AI, Ray Allen, and Kobe Bryant (random fact: Peja was drafted exactly one spot after Kobe). D West and Posey both were drafted at the same position (#18) after playing the same number of college seasons (4) at the same school (Xavier). How under-the-radar of them. Rasual Butler is the only second round pick to start for the Hornets this year. Devin Brown was the only Hornet not drafted. Imagine my surprise.

But wait! I’m not done! Let’s check out how the world champion Los Angeles Lakers stack up, in…. “If draft order was real life”!

1. Adam Morrison…………..3
2. Pau Gasol…………………..3
3. Lamar Odom………………4
4. Andrew Bynum………….10
5. Kobe Bryant………………13
6. Derek Fisher………………24
7. Shannon Brown………….25
8. Jordan Farmar…………..26
9. Sasha Vujacic…………… 27
10. Luke Walton………………32
11. Sun Yue…………………….40
12. Trevor Ariza………………43
13. DJ Mbenga………………N/A
14. Josh Powell……………..N/A

Utter hilarity. Just because I’m laughing at Adam Morrison, really. But actually the Lakers draft order is fairly reflective of reality. There are only three guys who are super out of place– Trevor Ariza is too low, Kobe should be up at #1, and Adam Morrison………… BWAHAHA! Yeah.

So basically, if you are saying anything after the 15th pick is gonna be garbage, then you are saying the (world champion) Lakers didn’t need those five productive bench players and one starter who were drafted lower than #24. You are saying the Hornets don’t have a chance to pick up a D West, Posey, Mo Pete (well, he didn’t play and we sucked this year– so maybe we did need him! so there), or Sual the Phoenix.

The draft is a huge crapshoot. But I think we’ll be good… as long as we don’t look at a big and go, “Oh, he’s over 6-10, it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t have any skills now. Even if he just stands there, it’s better than–”

No. It is not.

P.S. This post originally included like six Devin Brown jokes. I have removed them. But you can imagine them.

So yesterday afternoon I was joking around that, instead of my regular snarky one-liners on Twitter during the game, I would comment upon Cavs/Magic Game 4 entirely in haiku. Well, this didn’t quite pan out the way I expected, since one of my domains got hit by a spammer from Sweden who generated 150,000 spam comments and caused my entire account, including this blog, to be suspended by my host. If you came here last night, you might have noticed the fact that the site was, you know, missing. Sorry about that. It’s fixed now. But it caused me to be on the phone with tech support and as a result I missed most of the game.

True to my word, though, I hopped on Twitter with around 3 minutes left in the fourth quarter and did live game commentary through the rest of regulation and overtime entirely in haiku. I decided to put all my haikus together, just for fun:

1.
Dougie loves LeBron
but that pesky man named Skip
oh he’s just a friend

2.
Superman at line
strangely strong under pressure
hit one to close out!

3.
Rafer is so clutch
oh wait forget I said that
jack another one

4.
GET THE DAMN REBOUND
IT’S OUT OFF OF DELONTE
lucky break Magic

5.
Not too much time left
live or die by the jumper
time to live or die

6.
Come on Feel the Noise
watcha gonna do Magic
inbound play is key

7.
Swish goes the clutch shot
so this makes Rashard Lewis
King of what Kingdom???

8.
M-FING BULLSHIT
he tripped over his own feet
travesty ends not

9.
“What it comes down to”
“is Cavs are inferior”
“wasting our time” – M

10.
Fatigue a factor?
how bout monstrous ass screwings
by men in gray shirts?

11.
DUNK THAT SHIT DUH-WIGHT
the only way to live now
is fight through this hard!

12.
Holy MF shit
was that shot from in orbit?
make your own fate now

13.
They don’t need no crowns
these Magic know how to make
their own destiny

14.
“I’ll tell you how big”
“that play was,” says Doug– wait Doug
how big was what now?

15.
Clutcheriffic Dwight
tune it out with the music
that plays in your head

16.
Chosen One watches
as a taller star is made
in these late moments

17.
In an apartment
somewhere in corporate land
two puppets are sad

So last night after the Lakers defeated the Nuggets in Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, I fell asleep for like 2 hours. When I woke up, contacts sticking to my eyes, this is the first thing I saw:

Oh, you know, just had this red leather vest lying around the house and thought, "Wouldn't that look sweet with my madras shirt?"

Clearly this was some sleep-induced hallucination. Surely no one would be wacky enough to show up at an NBA press conference dressed as the really tall other half of Starsky and Hutch.

And yet Lamar Odom did. We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, we’re talking about a guy who showed up at a game last year wearing this:

It's a hoodie! It's a suit! It's a Lakesuit!

Like, wait, hold up. Is that…. a Laker colored suit? A Lakesuit? Or is it a hoodie? Or is it… a suit and a hoodie?

Lamar Odom strolled into the Lakers’ locker room some 25 minutes late. Lakers coach Phil Jackson had just finishing addressing the media during his pregame press session when he saw Odom and blurted out:

“Oh, my God,” Jackson said, laughing. “No wonder it took you a long time to get here.”

Jackson laughed at Odom’s outfit he was wearing. It was an all white suit. The sleeves on the coat were purple. The lapels were gold. “Are you in a marching band?” Jackson joked.

It was hard to describe what Odom was wearing. “This is indescribable,” Odom correctly said. “You can’t describe this.”

Pull up a seat, as we take a spin through the fashion world of one Lamar Odom…

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