FanHouse MarcoBellinelli

Jamal Crawford will be a spectator tonight, watching from the bench as the Warriors host the Bobcats. Is he injured? Not at all. Suspended? Hardly. Instead, he's the victim one of Don Nelson's whims.

Despite the fact that Golden State's backcourt is already short-handed -- Monta Ellis (ankle) has already missed one game and will likely miss several more -- Nelson decided that tonight is a good time to begin randomly benching veterans in order to give younger players more playing time. C.J. Watson is expected to start, and Anthony Morrow and Marco Bellinelli should see a few more minutes, as well.

Normally, you'd look at an opening night game where the Warriors took the New Orleans Hornets down to the wire without Monta Ellis and say "Hey, that's pretty good! How about these Dubs?!"

Unfortunately, it ignores two points. One, the Warriors still lost, and two, the Warriors completely abandoned the youth movement they centered around all summer. In last night's game, Don Nelson ran a 7 man rotation (outside of a scintillating 23 second performance by C.J. Watson), that featured all veterans, DeMarcus Nelson for about long enough for Nellie to figure out he didn't like him, and Al Harrington who has publically begged, demanded, and pleaded to be traded.

Who got the DNP-CDs? Marco Belinelli. Okay, that's understandable, the guy's never put in a good regular season stretch yet. Marcus Williams. Okay, when you're in the Nellie doghouse, you're in the Nellie doghouse. Brandan Wright. Huh. That's odd. He's a second year guy and they really need to get him some time. Guess he's still in the doghouse, too. Anthony Randolph. What? So after four months of talking about how much you love the kid and gushing over his handle you just sit him and don't play him?

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A season ago, the Pacific Division was able to send just two of its teams to the playoffs, but one of them went all the way to the Finals. And while that's not likely to change this season -- at least the part about the two playoff teams -- each club definitely has its share of intriguing story lines.

Let's start off in Los Angeles, where the Lakers' playoff run last season took place with one of the team's key components on the sidelines. There are always many stories in Laker-land, but a lot of the team's fans seem to be most interested in this one: With the return of Andrew Bynum, do the Lakers have a shot to win 70 games?

Despite the recent flood of positive Andrew Bynum stories hitting the L.A. papers lately (seriously, his P.R. machine is working overtime), I'm not convinced that his addition to the lineup automatically makes the Lakers unstoppable. There's the whole thing about figuring out how to co-exist with Pau Gasol, and how Lamar Odom will perform (likely) playing further away from the basket. When you add in the fact that even if the team was capable of winning 70 games, there's really no motivation to do so, unless someone else is on the same ridiculous pace and it would mean home court advantage.