The Saturday Stinger
Your Weekly Charlotte Hornets Notebook that’s not afraid to laugh at itself. Not here to convince you with stats, just good prose; I can’t afford Synergy.
The Sermon on The Spectrum (Center)
My big picture, Weekly State of the Hive Address:
If Optimus Prime played basketball, surely he was a center, right? Although centers aren’t often a team’s floor general like Prime was for the Autobots. Maybe he was a point guard stuck in a 6-foot-8 frame, like LaMelo Ball. We’ll never know.
If you can’t tell, my hyper-fixation on the Transformers franchise has run deep recently.
And *no* — it’s not because of Megan Fox.
If anything, I would’ve been better off lying to you all that it was.
It’s a lot better than publicly admitting it was because of a comic book instead of Megan Fox on a Camaro. Well, the ACTIVE iteration of my fixation, at least.
After all, I’m bringing up the exact same scene you thought about, for a reason. I had my days with the Michael Bay Transformers movies.
Good films. Respectable because of the IP. The 1st movie carried the franchise heavily…
But ultimately, whatever you think of the Bay movie franchise, people showed up to watch all of them because of the first one, and how it made them feel.
Well, for a way-too-long portion of my life, I kept showing up for Michael Jordan and the basketball team he owned and hoped he would make me feel, well, anything.
Like the first Bay movie — Megan Fox on a Camaro’s effect on young men everywhere, and the CGI in that movie being *way* ahead of its time — Michael Jordan’s first dosie-doh with the NBA left him with three championships.
Jordan’s second stint left him with three more championships, NBA Immortality, and a weird little blip in Washington that Kwame Brown would likely agree may have been better off forgotten.
Sure, Jordan scored 50+ with the Wiz. That little tiny robot in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was also pretty funny… Sometimes. But the two twin robot ones were… Awfully offensive. We all just agree not to talk about the plot holes in Revenge of the Fallen. Jordan agrees not to talk about Kwame and Washington. Same energy.
By the time Jordan did his victory tour, retired, and celebrated for a few years? Those few years before hard are his Transformers: Dark of the Moon. That movie is pretty good.
It’s certainly not as crass as Revenge of the Fallen was.
You’d have to imagine that: right on the cusp of owning an NBA team, before all that responsibility, that guy MJ was living the LIFE. So was Michael Bay after three movies. Not many movie franchises, outside of books, get trilogies in the end.
Just like I wanted for Michael Bay, I wish Jordan would’ve stopped at his Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and kept living his victory tour of NBA superstardom in retirement rather than pursue ownership.
Instead, Michael Bay had to go and make Transformers: The Last Knight (real-time ADHD writing interruption: it is increasingly strange the longer I write this, how similar this really is to MJ, lol).
Michael Jordan did his version of The Last Knight and had to buy the Bobcats’ majority stake.
And JUST LIKE MICHAEL BAY’S movie franchise’s perception to the public changed as a whole because of Transformers: The Last Knight, the way Michael Jordan’s majority ownership tenure ended has changed the discourse surrounding MJ’s entire career and relationship with the NBA forever.
It was that bad. What was Mark Wahlberg there for? Why did MJ buy a team when he didn’t want to pay new staff members who would want more money? The world may never know the answer to either of those questions.
Why did we stain the beautiful picture most people STILL have painted of you in their head as the NBA GOAT, MJ?
I don’t know. It’s as inexplicable as why Michael Bay would ever try to top what he accomplished with the CGI and cultural phenomena that WAS the first Transformers movie.
That was a lot of shade just on MJ, just to contradict myself from the beginning and tell you that, yes, in fact, my first experience with Transformers was the movies.
Clearly, because I’ve seen them enough to compare Michael Jordan to Michael Bay as much as I have (have you ever watched a preacher hammer in the same point for far too long? Ultimately, it works! This is called a sermon for a reason, and I’m from the South…).
But recently — to reference the beginning of this for the last time — I’ve been reading Image Comics’ Transformers series.
Before I tie this all into the Hornets:
I have to inform you all, that bro to bro? You have to go find them and read them. They’re so good. It’s what’s brought me back down this rabbit hole of Transformers, as a whole. I would’ve never considered watching the old-school cartoon for this franchise until I read them.
But I watched the 1st episode on YouTube recently and will likely end up watching the rest now, too. The comic… It’s just impeccable stuff. Couldn’t recommend it more. Comics keep me reading at a REALLY consistent level, and make it way easier to pick up novels. Even if I read the novels more slowly. Anyway. Hornets.
So, you remember how Bumblebee was the centerpiece of the Bay Transformers movies?
Well, by the SECOND page in the first Transformers comic book:
Bumblebee is shown to be brutally murdered. The metal on his face is all torn in. There is literally no facial expression visible.
The writers did something I ADORED, by immediately telling you, the reader — “This **** is NOT about Bumblebee. We’re not even giving you the chance to think it will be.”
It’s still not about him; I’m active with the comic now. Bumblebee was shown like 3 issues ago, dead again, and literally had exposition written for Optimus to tell somebody else who asked, “No, we cannot revive Bumblebee — his spark is beyond repair.” (Autobots had resources to do so at that time in the book, natural moment of wonder for the reader).
That’s how much they wanted you to know this was a unique story, one that finally gave other characters from the Transformers universe a spotlight. Those who hadn’t seen it yet, on a high level, b/c the movies excluded them, didn’t do their characters justice, etc.
Cliffjumper. Wheeljack. Soundwave. Hound. The whole comic series is a shared universe with G.I. Joe (it’s so damn good, y’all, I’m telling you), so naturally, the Army Jeep Transformer, Hound, is the first Transformer shown in the separate G.I. Joe book.
It does the source material justice.
And because I am who I am, it’s reminded me an awful lot of the Charlotte Hornets.
See, I made my MJ comparisons.
There’s a reason he’s nowhere to be found amidst my explanation for the comics, how good they are, or their storyline.
Because the new and improved Transformers? The best content in the franchise since… maybe ever.
The creators of that book and the people behind them at Image comics, Daniel Warren Johnson (Do a Powerbomb!, Extremity) and Robert Kirkman (created The Walking Dead, Invincible, and more)…
To me, those two guys’ work reinventing Transformers and the franchise’s perception resembles what our new organization has become. Jeff Peterson. Charles Lee. Gabe Plotkin. Rick Schnall.
What made me think of this long-winded anecdotal metaphor, to begin with:
Our new main Hornets guys in charge, just like the creators of the new Tranformers comics — they killed Bumblebee.
They murdered the ways of MJ ownership, and they did it early.
Through their actions, they let ALL of us know pretty quickly — “Hey, this is NOT a story of bad ownership again. We mean what we told you when we first got here.”
I think all the time about how the Charlotte Hornets ownership group has done that very thing and killed the Hornets’ franchise’s (ALL pun intended, who do you think I am?) Bumblebee.
With a must-win season on the line, we’ll have to see this offseason if Bumblebee will REMAIN dead.
Is the spark of Jordan still alive? Will they botch the opportunity in front of them and sign 2026’s Lance Stephenson, succumbing to Megatron?
We don’t know for sure yet.
I had to wait 30 issues from the second page of issue 1 to find out if Bee’s spark was ever going to be repairable. But I did inevitably find out he was gone for good.
It’s not Jeff’s 30th issue, but it is his third offseason now, and it’s finally time to get some finality on whether Bumblebee — i.e., the ways of Michael Jordan — will remain dead for good.
Peterson and the Hornets’ summer moves this year, with so much momentum in their hands after ‘25-‘26, will give us that answer once and for all, I believe.
I hope Jeff is as tired as I was of seeing that yellow Camaro driving around during the early 2010’s.
The last two sections of Owen Watterson’s weekly three-segment column will be available at 5:00 PM EST on The Saturday Stinger Substack.