What could have been? For Hornets, final home loss serves as a look back on season

Perhaps in a different universe, everything turns out differently.

That goes for this entire Charlotte Hornets season.

Perhaps there, in an alternate reality, the Hornets don't lose their best playmaker (Nic Batum) to an elbow injury one minute into a preseason game. Perhaps their flashy first-round pick (Malik Monk) from the blue-blood college juggernautdoesn't miss the summer with an ankle injury. Perhaps the beloved head coach (Steve Clifford) isn't forced to step away from his team to deal with health issues. Or perhaps .... well, you get the picture.

This Hornets season came off the rails early and never course-corrected, due to one thing after another after another. These players deserve credit for never making excuses, even if they were there for the taking.

"We're not ones to make excuses," Marvin Williams said. "We've had more than our fair share of opportunities to win basketball games with or without those guys, and we haven't done the best job of that, so we have to kind of own up at that."

But that doesn't stop the fact that this entire season seems like a "What could have been?" situation. And that's because ...

"It is. It is," Batum said after Sunday's 123-117 loss to the Indiana Pacers. "We're right there, like all year long, and when I see some teams, (I think how) we should be in the playoffs for sure. And that's why we're sad.

"This team was built to do something special this year."

Only that something never materialized. With the loss Sunday, Charlotte's overall record falls to 35-46. The team will miss the playoffs for a second straight season, even after the offseason acquisition of Dwight Howard and Kemba Walker's All-Star caliber play. The home portion of the Hornets' schedule is complete, and Tuesday's season finale at Indiana will be no more than a formality.

And really, that's about all Sunday's game was, either.

There isn't much left for the Hornets to play for except for experience for younger guys. That's why Monk and Willy Hernangomez, acquired from the New York Knicks at the trade deadline, played as many minutes as the starters. It's why late in the game, with the Hornets making a furious comeback, Clifford opted not to put his starters back in.

Sunday's game, taken as a whole, actually rounds out fairly nicely as a microcosm of this season.

The first quarter, things stayed close. A lot of that credit Sunday goes to Williams, who hit three 3-pointers and scored 11 of his eventual 16 points.

The second quarter got uglier, as the Pacers stretched their lead to as many as 16. It wasn't just Victor Oladipo, the team's All-Star combo guard, doing the damage either (although his 19 points at halftime certainly can't be ignored). Rather, the Hornets let Domantas Sabonis — a 2016 first-round pick traded once on draft night and again in his first offseason — slash through their defense for 16 of his eventual career-high 30.

"In the first half, the second unit was good offensively," Clifford said, "but defensively you could see it was a struggle."

Then in the third quarter, the Hornets picked up their play, just as they did in the first two months of 2018. A 10-0 run even cut the Pacers' lead to just two at one point.

And then came the fourth quarter, which — like seemingly every game after the All-Star break — felt desperate. Heaves from behind the arc, rushed offensive sets — that has become emblematic of this season, and desperation was the case again on Sunday.

After the game, Oladipo and Sabonis stuck around the court to sign autographs for a few minutes. The children clamoring for the players' attention were almost all decked in Pacers gear, even at the Hornets' home finale.

Maybe in that alternate universe, it's Walker and Howard signing those autographs. Maybe the Hornets complete the comeback in that world, and maybe that bumps them up in the playoff standings. Or maybe ...

Actually, never mind. There is no alternate reality — only this sad one for the Hornets and their fans.

Oh, what could have been.

This story was originally published April 8, 2018 at 10:42 PM with the headline "What could have been? For Hornets, final home loss serves as a look back on season."