The Hornets fired Byron Scott on Thursday morning after a 3-6 start, but the real entertainment was still hours away. Falling under the definition of "this would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad," the Hornets once again showed that the NBA is no place for a ramshackle, mom 'n pop operation.
That is, if the Hornets still qualify as an operation.
Despite their financial woes, someone at the Bees' Podunk practice facility had enough money to purchase two knives: One for team president Hugh Weber to stick into Scott's back on the way out, and another to plunge into that of GM-turned-coach Jeff Bower on the way in. This is how the surreal scene played out on my TV, as I watched Bower, a good basketball man, get humiliated before the sun had even set on his first day on the new job.
Weber evidently was quite successful in the food service business before joining his brother-in-law, George Shinn, in running the Hornets. After Bower finished taking a few questions about replacing Scott as the captain of the Titanic, Weber sidled up to the assembled media and served him a cold, stale plate of gotchya.
"We looked at the best options," Weber said. "We felt the best option was putting someone at the helm who understood not only what this team was talented at, but understood the challenges that lay ahead. So Jeff became the obvious choice ... because accountability is key. I told Jeff, 'The genie's out of the bottle.' Because nobody can say he doesn't have the right players for the right reasons. Jeff has hand-selected this team, and we like the idea now that Jeff will be held accountable for results."
Bower stood there a few feet behind Weber throughout all of this. I don't want to draw too many conclusions from body language but it sure looked like he swallowed hard when Weber said those things. Welcome to the hot seat, coach. Go git 'em!
• Hornets fire coach Scott, insert GM Bower
This is what the Hornets have become -- a pathetic, homespun, bacterial stew of nepotism and finger-pointing. Shinn's commitment to post-Katrina New Orleans would be admirable if he'd shown the same commitment to Charlotte a few years back. Once again, the Hornets do things on the fly and on the cheap, playing in a champagne league on a moonshine budget.
Back in May, after the Hornets were embarrassed in a 4-1 playoff series loss to the Nuggets, Weber told the Times-Picayune that he and Shinn had decided it was best to retain Scott as a lame duck on the last year of his contract. He was accompanied for the interview by Hornets executive Chad Shinn, George's son. But that was then, this is now, and Weber didn't mention whether he accepted any responsibility for that decision.
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| For the first time in his NBA career, All-Star point guard Chris Paul will not have Byron Scott as his coach. (Getty Images) |
Firing Scott may or may not have solved anything. That's not the point. The point is that the front man for this disastrous turn of events Wednesday was not a credible NBA coach -- no offense, Coach Bower -- but rather an empty suit who knows his way around a board room but not a basketball court.
Before joining the Hornets when they were in Oklahoma City in the wake of Katrina, Weber worked for Proctor & Gamble and then a company called Ventura Foods, which he grew into a $2 billion business. Good for him. Ventura Foods makes Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing. This is the stuff of a columnist's dreams, stuff you can't make up.
So when Weber was finishing squirting Thousand Island all over Bower's face, he moved onto Scott, whom he accused of offering "no specific direction" on how to solve the Hornets' problems.
"The way the problem was defined, we don't agree with," Weber said. "So this was not an issue of trust or effort. This was an issue of execution."
Asked if Bower, standing portside, would be required to steer this doomed ship to the playoffs to keep his job(s), Weber said, "All of our goals are specific and actually much more granular than you'd think."
Really? Who are you, Mr. Weber? And can you please pass the bacon bits?
"We believe that there are actually very fixable, very tactical, very specific goals that we have that were not being achieved," he said. "When you see habits forming, you don't want to see those habits re-form when you bring in new guys. You see team performance, you're hopeful through training camp, you're seeing signs of hope and glimmer. But the body of work has to come together in a way that you see progress. And we saw that gap actually growing. We saw frustration throughout the organization; not just with the coaches, but with the players and Mr. Shinn."
Chief among the frustrated is the most important person in the organization, Chris Paul, whose patience has all but run out. He watches his contemporaries compete for and win championships, while he's stuck in the smallest market in the league. This wouldn't be so bad if he could win there. But he can't. Not with a good GM calling 20-second timeouts instead of scouting. Not with new top assistant Tim Floyd, a failed former head coach of the Hornets whose most notable career accomplishments have been coaching the post-Jordan Bulls and breaking up a casino fight.
After another in a string of humiliating losses recently, Paul hinted at one possible solution to the Hornets' freefall from the Western Conference elite. It may not be granular, but it might just work: Increasing the pace and giving more playing time to those who can do that, namely Marcus Thornton and Darren Collison.
"We've just got to find out, are we going to be a fast team?" Paul said. "Are we going to be a slow-down team? Are we going to run a set every time? We've got to find out what our identity is."
That and something else Paul said recently -- "Our defense is killing us. We can't stop anybody" -- can now be read as clear indictments of Scott, a noted defensive coach. But his admission that he's "envious" of his peers who are in better situations was an indictment of the whole shebang. And that isn't going to change by shuffling the deck chairs.
"We believe that our personnel has the ability to perform at a much higher level than it has been performing," Bower said. "We believe that the gap that needs to be filled to reach that point is attainable."
Someone asked if Bower accepted responsibility for what's happened. As if he had any choice. "I accept responsibility for the results, you know?" Bower said. "Up to this point and from this point forward. We collectively set out a plan, and right now we're not satisfied with the way the plan has been executed. It's my job to fix that."
Good luck. At least when you go to a restaurant and they put salad dressing on wilted lettuce, you can send it back.
Ross Devonport 
