Well that game was uglier than your grandma's fat friend, but at least she started looking foxy down the stretch, as if you had a few too many drinks at her retirement party or something.

Hey, a bad win is better than no win so we'll keep on with the smiling.

We'll call this one a team effort

I'm sick as a dog (again) so I'll have to keep this one short and sweet. On to the bullets...

  • Final score was 100-86. We sucked pretty good up until late in the fourth and then ran away with it. Linkage: box | recap | standings

  • Peja Stojakovic continued his evil ways, proving to be our most consistent offensive threat tonight and finishing with 27 points on 9-of-15 shooting. He seemes to have abandoned the tidy goatee but methinks that's just because he knows we're getting wise to his dark side.

  • Apparently Byron Scott went apeshit in the locker room at halftime, because we were playing like chumps and trailed by seven right about then. It took our guys a while to wake up and start playing in the second half, but I guess the talk worked. Still, I think it wasn't just the Hornets playing bad in that first half; it was also the Bulls playing out of their minds, especially on defense. They were doubling David West down low and doing a great job of rotating to cover everyone else. Combine that with Kirk Hinrich hitting shots and Andreas Nocioni playing like a landmine and the sluggish start is a little more understandable.

  • West struggled again with those double teams, but came through down the stretch, making some tough buckets and finally shutting up that heckler in the Chicago crowd. It wasn't his most poetic game (six turnovers!), but he somehow ended up with 27 points on 11-of-20 shooting. Ok then.

  • Hey look, it's Chris Paul being fantastic again. 25 points, 14 assists, 4 rebounds, 1 turnover. Numerous big plays in the fourth quarter, too, like when he picked one from Hinrich and dropped it back on the break to West, then rushed across town to save the family of seven from the burning building. Some of that doesn't even show up in the boxscore.

  • Did anyone else see that Morris Bart ad on CST at halftime? He was alongside Mo-Pete and Hugo on the court, and tosses the ball over his head at the basket at the end. The ball disappears from view and we see it dropping through the net a second later, obviously thrown from a completely different direction. It was so bad it was pretty good.

  • Rasual Butler, I'm happy for you dude. You had a rough night but came through with one massive jumper and one not so massive jumper because the game was pretty much over by then. Still, I'm happy for you. Keep doing that.

  • With Peterson out and Butler in the starting lineup, the bench struggled even more so than usual offensively. 10 points total. Ryan Bowen did come up with some key defensive plays however, and Hilton Armstrong almost canceled out all his dumb mistakes by showing some not-so-dumb stuff. Gotta admit, the kid is definitely going stronger to the basket these days. Me likey.

  • Pretty physical game tonight. Lots of bumping and jostling for position. There was Thabo Sefolosha and his sixteen billion vowels trying to hassle Chris Paul midway through the fourth, and Tyson Chandler had himself a good old-fashioned battle with Ben Wallace down low. They came out pretty much even, except Ben had that fadeaway and Tyson had the W.

  • Interesting five Byron had on the floor in the early stages of the second quarter. First he went with Jackson, Pargo, Armstrong, Bowen and Chandler, and then he pulled Pargo for Butler and Armstrong for West. Neither of those units lasted very long out there, and for good reason.

Ok, gotta wrap this one up. Hornets back at it tomorrow in Milwaukee, facing the Bucks. After that it's a weekend of All-Star goodness.

Always something going on in New Orleans.