It’s official: Time to blow up Bobcats roster

Given their pathetic offense AND slumping defense, the Bobcats need to seriously consider trading their go-to guy Stephen Jackson. (Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images)

If it wasn’t official already, Monday’s 33-point loss to a Wizards team missing John Wall made it official: The Bobcats are a disaster, and their management team should be considering all trade options.

We really shouldn’t be totally surprised by this. The Bobcats won 44 games last season with about as thin a margin for error as a team can have. They played like a powerhouse at home, where they went 31-10, and they won in spite of an offense that ranked 24th in the league in points per possession. They did that in two ways:

1) By getting to the foul line a ton; only Denver and Oklahoma City got their more often, per field-goal attempt, than the Bobcats.

2) Playing the stingiest defense in the league.

If you figured that second part was sustainable, it turns out you were wrong. Their defense has dropped from elite to league average, while their offense has reached Milwaukee-like lows behind a hoard of turnovers the likes of which the league has rarely seen.

Let’s start with those turnovers, since the Bobcats committed 29 –29!! — against the Wizards on Monday. It is really, really hard for a professional team to commit 29 turnovers. It has happened in only 23 games since the 1998-99 season, and the Bobcats became the first team to hit that number since the 2005-06 season.

If only Monday night were an isolated thing. The Bobcats are turning the ball over on 16.8 percent of their possessions for the season. That is by far the worst mark in the league, and it is a hideously bad when put in historical context. Since the league introduced the three-point line in 1979-80, only 18 teams have finished a season with a turnover rate that high, and 14 of them played in the 1980s, when both the average pace and turnover rate were considerably higher than they are now. Only two teams — the 2006-07 Magic and the the 2005-06 Knicks — have even cracked the 16 percent barrier since the league banned hand-checking outright, and those two didn’t quite reach Charlotte’s current turnover crisis level.

The Larry Brown-era Bobcats have always been turnover-prone, but the problem this year is bad enough on its own to submarine a season. What’s amazing about Charlotte is that it manages do this even though its primary point guard, D.J. Augustin, annually has one of the lowest turnover rates — and one of the best assist-to-turnover ratios — in the league. But Augustin isn’t a top-flight creator, and so the Bobcats turn to other guys — Stephen Jackson, Boris Diaw and Gerald Wallace — to create offense, often in isolation, and all of those players are sporting turnover rates above their career averages this season. Diaw has been particularly sloppy, but this is a teamwide problem.

It’s a problem the team cannot survive now that its defense has slumped. And that slump has not been completely unexpected. The Bobcats did two things very well last year that teams rarely do simultaneously at an elite level: They played shutdown defense on three-pointers while rarely fouling anywhere on the court. The Bobcats held opponents to 33.8 shooting from deep last season; only the Lakers were better. Charlotte yielded a tad fewer than one free throw for every five opponent field-goal attempts, the best mark in the league — just ahead of those same Lakers. Over the last dozen seasons, only 11 teams have pulled off both of those things in the same season, and only two did so between the 2002-03 season and last season, as the league’s three-point accuracy generally improved.

The Lakers have been able to maintain that double again this season. The Bobcats have not. Opponents have hit 36 percent of their threes against Charlotte, and the Bobcats are sending their opponents to the line at a league-average rate. In other words: There has been some nasty regression to the mean for Charlotte on defense, and the team’s already pathetic offense hasn’t been able to make up for that regression.

The result is a 9-18 record, good for 11th in the Eastern Conference, just behind the Raptors and just ahead of the Pistons, Cavaliers and the rest of the conference dregs. The Bobcats have played one of the easier schedule in the league, so there is no hope to be found there.

The team as currently constructed won’t have any cap room until after next season, by which time Diaw, Nazr Mohammed and Eduardo Najera will all have come off Charlotte’s books. But even then, the Bobcats still have $39.4 million in committed salary for the 2012-13 season, and that’s before you factor in rookie deal extensions and salaries for draft picks Charlotte gets between now and then. Tyrus Thomas is the only desirable young asset on this roster, and his mental breakdowns have resulted in more time on the bench than a player producing at his level (he has the 17th-highest Player Efficiency Rating in the league) would normally get.

Factor all of this in, and the Bobcats almost have to at least considering dealing both Jackson and Wallace, who will make nearly $21 million combined in 2012-13. That might not be easy, but there’s no valid argument against blowing up this roster and rebuilding in earnes t– unless you consider a couple of million dollars in playoff revenue from two home playoff losses a valid argument.