The Charlotte Bobcats and the Five year plan

The Charlotte Bobcats front office has spoken many times about long term goals and not making quick fixes  to improve the team over the short term, but I fear that they've taken that to another level.

On the radio the other day, Team president Ed Tapscott really downplayed making any noise in the 2006 free agent market. He did however really talk excitedly about the big name free agents of 2007, and how the Bobcats want to save cap space to make a run at one of those players.

With the absence of high schoolers in this year's draft, the 2006 NBA draft should be one of the weakest in over a decade, outside of Adam Morrison there isn't anybody coming out that you could really consider a future “star”.  The 2007 draft will be a different story all together, You'll have the influx of one year players that were not able to enter the draft after high school graduation, and to top it off you have the player that could anchor your franchise for the next 10 years, Greg Oden. He has the talent to completely turn a franchise around.

These reasons, plus the shocking inactivity at the trade deadline ( notably not making a deal to move either Melvin Ely or Brevin Knight and not taking Seattle up on the offer to trade Kareem Rush ) leads me to believe that the organization is satisfied playing at the 18 to 25 game win level until the year 2007. In my opinion thats a big risk for them to take, because theres only so many 10 game losing streaks and “playing close while being out manned” that the fans can take before they completely lose interest.

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