While a couple of years on the fringes may beckon, the prospect of a strong 2016-17 free agent class including the title-less league MVP Kevin Durant and Chicago's brilliant and combative center Joakim Noah, among others, offers hope for the future in a King-less republic.
Would the man who hopes to be the next President of another, no less riven Republic take fright at the new Red menace across the pond?
By all accounts this was the case in Hoxha's Albania, less a republic than a prolonged episode of mass psychosis, its most eloquent memorial the hundreds of thousands of concrete defence bunkers still poking up like mushrooms across its countryside.
The levels of autocracy, criminality, tin-pot cronyism, and resurgent nationalisms emerged on such a heroic and ruinous scale that the historian Stephen Kotkin has referred to the less fortunate republics of the former Soviet Union as "Trashcanistans".
But with the chief posts pre-anointed by the Supreme Leader, the arch-conservative, militaristic tone of the next cabinet is ensured.The IRGC leaders have united behind Mr Ahmadinejad not only to defend their shared idea of an Iran that is less of a republic but more stridently "Islamic".
In Episode IV, what was once the original "Star Wars," the whole Jedi Force thing is a misty half-remembered religious cult that all but a few scoff at as an antiquated relic — even though, as we later learn in the prequels, it had been a dominant force in the life of the Republic less than twenty years before, with its own high tower and council.
However, the frequency of such interviews varies, with five OECD requiring an interview on a monthly basis or less (Czech Republic, France, Korea, Slovak Republic and the UK).
Overall, the United States must give the Republic less excuse for legitimacy in anyone's eyes.
So in practice, the Austrian diplomat believes, the "Serb republic" will become less and less different in character from Bosnia's other half, a federation of Croats and Muslims.In Serbia, those who feared that the extradition of Mr Milosevic would create a terrible backlash have been proved wrong.
The Czech Republic is less a promised land than a cash-strapped economy in transition.
Stalin, with less enthusiasm, backed the republic, while the Soviet-controlled Comintern channelled communism's global ambitions.
