Enjoy the season, stop obsessing over Yao/imaginary trades/firings!

Enough about Yao. Really.

To be brutally honest, he's not doing badly, and he has huge upside, but he's not going to achieve it overnight. He's not even going to achieve it after three years. At the moment he's the second highest scoring true center in the NBA, behind Shaq. Which isn't really bad company. Sure he hasn't progressed as fast as Amare Stoudemire, but he's progressed much faster than Eddie Curry, Tyson Chandler, or Kwame Brown.

Most everyone agrees he needs to play better defense, get more touches, learn to avoid fouls, and singlehandedly defuse the tension in the Middle East. But it's not going to happen tomorrow. No matter how many times the same posts appear.

Other things that won't be happening this season:

1. We won't be magically combining Maurice Taylor/Weatherspoon/Juwan Howard + our number 1 pick for a top PF. We won't even be getting a mediocre one. Everyone else in the NBA knows our PF's are soft and have bad contracts. The best we can hope is to trade one bad contract for another (as we did with Moochie Norris for Weatherspoon.) The only people any other team would be seriously interested in are Yao and T-Mac, and niether of them are going anywhere.

2. We won't be pulling a quality top tier PG out of thin air, so we'll have to be happy with what Bobby Sura, Andre Barrett, and whichever 10-day contract point guard we have signed we'll bring us. (or whoever rotates off of IL that week.)

3. Our Europeans players (Badiene and that PG fellow with the funny names) won't be saving us this season. Hopefully, they'll both pay dividends next year, since those are the two spots we are most in need of help. If anything, I think it reflects well on CD that our two trouble spots have at least some help coming.

4. JVG is not the problem. Sure his quotes are annoying, as is his seemingly cynical attitude about everything. He's kind of ugly too. But really, he's doing the best with what he has to work with, which really isn't that much. There isn't a gimmicky offense in the world that could make this aging team look like Phoenix, and our big man isn't consistent enough to copy the Spurs. Instead we are barely hanging on to .500, and in the ultra-competitive West, being about .500 doesn't mean you are a bad team.

In short, enjoy the season. We'll be playing some ugly ball this year, but there isn't any help coming. So ride it out, the last half of the season we'll be in the thick of the western conference playoff race. We're ahead of Utah, Denver, and Minnesota right now, I'm sure everyone would have taken that at the start of the season.

Or we can return to the Manic Depressive pattern that has plagued this board all season. (A win! We are contenders, Sura is a god, Yao is ready! T-Mac is awesome! Oh no, a loss, we suck, Sura to be traded, T-Mac sucks, where is Franchise? Refs hate Yao! FIRE JVG!)