Le Basketbawl

Does the person or people who own your favorite NBA team have a vast knowledge of basketball? In today’s day and age the answer is most likely not. NBA teams are owned by guys who made their fortunes in other businesses and now want a toy. But these guys don’t have to settle for a Frickin video game; they can afford the  real thing. Now teh best kind of an NBA team owner is a guy like a Dan Gilbert in Cleveland or My Main Man Cubes Mark Cuban who owns the Dallas Mavericks. These guys are smart enough to hire good basketball people to run their teams and they let them do their jobs.

However not all NBA fans are fortunate enough to have such smart business men as owners; there are two other kinds of owners right now in the league. There are the guys like “EL DOUCHE“ the PUD that owns “MY BOYS” the New York Knicks James Dolan and Glen Taylor in Minnesota. Guys who hire incompetents to run their teams and these incompetents destroy their team. Dolan after finally having the NUTS to fire Isiah Thomas brought in Donnie Walsh as Team President and Mike D’Antoni as head coach. So far New York Vinnie has not been impressed.

Then there is the third kind of  Team Owner; maybe the most dangerous of them all! The hands on owner who gets involved too deeply in the decision making and usually could mess up a Frickin Free Lunch. For the last few years New Orleans Bobcats Team Owner George Shinn allowed his basketball people to do their jobs and they showed success winning the Southwest Division in 2008 for the first time. Hornets head coach Byron Scott was named NBA Coach Of The Year and All-Star point guard Chris Paul came in second in the MVP voting.

The Hornets looked like they were a team on the rise; David West was a hard nosed power forward and Tyson Chandler had finally started to show what NBA scouts saw when he went so high in the NBA Draft.  Paul and Chandler had perfected an alley-oop play that would catch their opponents flat footed. Paul’s closest friend on the club Rasual Butler was the other starting guard and Peja Stojakovic made the team a force to be reckoned with.

Injuries plagued the club last season as Chandler was out for an extended period of time and they did not play as well as they had the year before. However rather than show patience and come back to camp with the same team in October the team from New Orleans decided to make changes. Rasual Butler became a Free Agent and signed with the Los Angeles Clippers; and the team traded Chandler to Charlotte for Emeka Okafor. Needless to say the team was not as good as it was in 2008 and got off to a 3-6 start.

The Hornets could have stayed the course and hope the ship righted itself or they could make a move to help the team improve. Instead they chose a third option; they made a move that made the team significantly weaker. They fired head coach Byron Scott. The New Orleans Hornets have a lot of problems with their squad this season but none of them involved Scott. Shinn made a Frickin stupid mistake and let go of a coach that will one day win an NBA Title and put General Manager Jeff Bower in his place.

It looks like Shinn is not done yet tinkering with his team. Sunday the “Cleveland Plain Dealer” reported that according to their sources the team is willing to deal any of their players except for Chris Paul. So Shinn has decided to blow the whole Frickin thing up and start from scratch.

New York Vinnie has written this before; over the last couple of seasons the Hornets were the team I was rooting for in the Western Conference. Now when they played “MY BOYS”  of course New York Vinnie would root for the Knicks; they are Frickin family! However New York Vinnie dropped his allegiance to them after the moves they made this summer.

Now with Scott fired and most of the team on the block it will not be long before George Shinn puts his team right in the Frickin dump. Some people do not know when to leave well enough alone; George Shinn fits into that category. When is team is in the lottery for the next few years he will have no one to blame but himself.