Vinny Del Negro has been under fire from media members, bloggers and fans since about five seconds after his hiring was announced. And those five seconds simply represented the average amount of time it took people to recover from the shock. Like pretty much everybody else, I have my doubts about Vinny’s coaching acumen, but I’m willing to give him some more time to spread his wings before watching him plummet violently to his coaching death. So I’m less concerned about how he’s doing than what he’s saying.

And what he’s saying is boring. As in very.

Seriously, Vinny couldn’t titillate us with his verbiage even if the subject of the conversation was an evening spent with the Luvabulls in a hot tub filled with scented massage oils and live carp. Therefore, in conjunction with my buddy Evil Ted, I now present you with the Dull-Negrometer. Going forward, this device — which is the product of several seconds of intense scientific research — will be used to measure the level of boring in Vinny’s various pre and post-game comments.

The Dull-Negrometer uses a simple scale of 1-10, with 1 being the least boring (relative to “Vinny-speak”) and 10 being the most egregiously boring/obvious/passive-aggressive. Here are examples of the Dull-Negrometer in action:

Level 1: “We were beaten on the offensive glass tonight.”

Level 2: “Kevin Garnett is an intense competitor.”

Level 3: “They outhustled us.”

Level 4: “Our defense needs to improve.”

Level 5: “Aaron Gray gives us size up front.”

Level 6: “Losing like this isn’t fun.”

Level 7: “We need to play better.”

Level 8: “We can’t win if the other team scores that many points.”

Level 9: “We lost tonight.”

Level 10: “Our team mascot is a bull” / “I’m Italian”

Now that we have the means to measure what Brian Windhorst once referred to as platitude-ese, you can expect all of Vinny’s future comments to be rated by the Dull-Negrometer. Stay tuned…