On the bright side for the 0-16 Nets, who must beat the Lakers Sunday or join the dregs of NBA history, they're the best historically awful team ever.
Two teams have started 0-17 before, the expansion Miami Heat in 1988, and the may-as-well-have-been-expansion Los Angeles Clippers in 1999.
The Heat wound up 15-67 with only three players, Rony Seikaly, Grant Long and Kevin Edwards, whose NBA careers lasted longer than three seasons.
The Clippers went 9-41 in the lockout-shortened season when owner Donald T. Sterling waited until Jan. 13 to hire coach Chris Ford.
The Nets, who have a prospect-studded roster, are in this storied company because of injuries to starters Devin Harris, Yi Jianlian and Courtney Lee.
Otherwise, they would have one win or two, anyway.
As Coach Lawrence Frank noted in Milwaukee, where they were down to eight players, "We were looking for Bango the Buck, to see if he wanted to wear a Nets uniform."
Not that 0-17 starts can match the season-long standard for misery set by the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers, who set the record, going 9-73.
The 76ers didn't look laughable with veterans Fred Carter, Tom Van Arsdale, John Block and Bill Bridges, at least until they got on the floor.
With Billy Cunningham having just jumped to the ABA and Coach Jack Ramsay bolting for Buffalo, the new coach (read: only man who would take the job) was rah-rah Roy Rubin from little Long Island University, whose players took one look at him and did a team eye roll.
The media wasn't much more impressed. The Philadelphia Daily News' Jack Kiser unfailingly referred to him as Poor Roy Rubin, or PRR.
Given to motivational ploys, PRR didn't understand that his veterans didn't want to listen to a psychologist explain group dynamics on a bus trip to Baltimore, when they could be doing something more productive, like sleeping.
"We're sitting on the bus and this guy is going on and on about group decisions being better than individual ones," said Alan Richman, the Philadelphia Bulletin beat writer who survived to become GQ's wine and food critic.
"I'm looking at Bill Bridges and he looks like he wants to rip this guy's head off."
With Rubin going all out, they went 4-4 in the preseason, suggesting they could split their games with other bad teams, to PRR, anyway.
Actually, no one was as bad as they were. If someone was on a given day, investigations ensued, as when Seattle fired Coach Tom Nissalke after the 76ers won there, prompting stories that the SuperSonics players did it on purpose to get rid of him.
Rubin lasted 51 games, of which he lost 47.
The new player-coach, Kevin Loughery, went 5-26, wondering, he said, "how it is in life that people are assembled for a purpose, to come together for good or bad."
Deciding that coming together for good was preferable, Loughery then jumped at an offer from the ABA's New York Nets and coached them to two titles.
The 76ers were back in the NBA Finals by 1977 with former ABA stars George McGinnis and Julius Erving, got there again in 1980 and 1982, and finally won in 1983 with Moses Malone, another former ABA star, and with Cunningham, who had returned from the ABA, as coach.
What goes around comes around. Historically bad seasons, however anguished, are just transitions to whatever comes next.
The Nets have a promising future, even if it's always receding farther into the future, with more talent and cap room than the Knicks, even if that and minority owner Jay-Z may not get them into the LeBron James derby.
"LeBron's relationship with Jay-Z will go on regardless," former James confidant Sonny Vaccaro recently told the New York Times' Jonathan Abrams.
"If the Nets aren't in Brooklyn, he's not going over there (New Jersey) for even $200 million. They're putting pieces together. They're doing the right things. They're just living in the wrong building."
The Nets are still expected to move to Brooklyn, eventually. A Russian billionaire is in the process of buying 80 percent of the team, which would take it out of continual cost-cutting mode and make it a major-market player.
In the meantime, someone may have to take the fall soon; and it's not going to be their trainer.
Frank had a nice run, at least until this season. Nevertheless, it's not good to start 0-16 with your contract running out and a new owner coming in.
In Sacramento, where the Nets fell to 0-16 Friday, Frank, a stand-up guy to the end, put it on himself, noting, "I take full responsibility that we can't play 48 minutes .... especially in the situation we're in."
Yet to break ground in Brooklyn, the Nets hope to move into the new Newark arena next season, which would end their Swamp Outpost Era with its Motel-Off-the-Turnpike ambience and their desperate marketing ploys, like sending players to season ticket-holders' functions.
"I'm Devin Harris of the Nets and I'd just like to wish the Bar Mitzvah boy L'chaim!"
In another silver lining, where is there to go but up?
Huge heart, no clue
They invented the term "street cred" for Allen Iverson, which was fortunate. At the end, it was all he had left.
Peers were effusive when Iverson announced his retirement but management people talked about him as if the A in AI stood for Attila, sneering at things he said like: "I can't come off the bench. ... I'm a first-ballot Hall of Famer. ... My fans won't stand for it."
That was AI, pound-for-pound, the most dominating NBA player ever with a huge heart, no clue and total honesty.
He broke all the rules with his tattoos, cornrows and shorts sliding off his backside, mouthing off as a rookie to Michael Jordan.
Mike lived to set cocky kids aflame, but AI turned him into a pillar of salt with a memorable crossover (on which he palmed the ball only for a second or two).
Coaches said the problem wasn't AI going out every night, but that teammates who went with him were wasted the next day while he buzzed around like a hornet.
Kids thrilled at his one-man assault on the establishment, making his "The Answer" Reebok line the biggest hit anyone outside Nike ever had. Iverson reportedly is reconsidering at the urging of former coaches John Thompson and Larry Brown (who had just said of Stephen Jackson, "After six years with Allen, I don't look at anybody as a challenge").
Some challenges are worth it. In 2001 Iverson led Brown's 76ers to the Finals.
It's no longer about getting back to the Finals, or starting. It's about ending, which, MJ could have told AI, is harder.
Abe Pollin R.I.P
Washington's Abe Pollin, who died last week at 85, won a title, but was a better person than owner, personally generous as well as devoted to charity. Said Wes Unseld, his star who became his unsuccessful GM: "I have no doubt that he kept me longer in positions than he should have and longer than I wanted him to."
Said President Barack Obama, of Pollin's willingness to build a downtown arena: "Abe believed in Washington, D.C., when many others didn't, putting his own fortune on the line to help revitalize the city he loved. He was committed to the teams he guided, generous to those who needed it most and as loyal to the people of D.C. as they were to him."
Meanwhile, Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler and Antawn Jamison are once more scoring a lot of points, and the Wizards are circling the drain. After last week's loss to San Antonio, Brendan Haywood talked about checking egos at the door, loudly enough for Arenas to hear him. Arenas said he had already sacrificed his game, might have to go back to launching, and their problem was having eight upcoming free agents (Haywood, Mike Miller, Randy Foye, Javaris Crittenton, Earl Boykins, Paul Davis, Dominic McGuire, Fabricio Oberto) with their own agendas.
T-Mac, T-fouls
Houston's Tracy McGrady says he's close to returning, but the team is past caring. After last season when he left and came back seven times but never lasted longer than eight games, they want to collect the insurance money, watch his contract run out and forget they ever knew him. McGrady now has strained relationships with Coach Rick Adelman, GM Daryl Morey and trainer Keith Jones. When he put his uniform on before a recent game, it was just to get reporters to ask when he'd be back, so he could point out they were holding him back.
T's for two: Rasheed Wallace didn't just join Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce and Ray Allen in Boston, but motor-mouth Kendrick Perkins, his closest competition in collecting technical fouls. Wallace got his fifth T last week, tying Perkins for the league lead, noting, as usual, "I already know what it is, man. They know what it is."
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