Barring a major trade, this is the Hornets’ mediocre defense the rest of the season
The past two Charlotte Hornets games -- a victory over the Sacramento Kings and a blowout loss to the Denver Nuggets -- illustrate a harsh reality:
This is who they are defensively. Barring some unlikely deal for a shotblocker/rebounder, the Hornets’ defense will be mediocre at best the rest of this season.
Fans talk a lot about coach James Borrego not focusing more on the 3-point line or what was his heavy use of zone. Those are more symptoms than the problem, which is the limitations of this roster.
They aren’t big or particularly physical. Cody Martin is the only player in the rotation who is an above-average defender. There is no rim-protector and the guards give up abundant dribble-penetration.
The Hornets ended a four-game winning streak Wednesday in a 129-104 road loss in Denver. Two nights earlier, they trailed the first three quarters before winning by six over the Kings, one of the NBA’s worst teams. The common factor in those games: The Hornets gave up 68 points in the lane to the Kings and 64 to the Nuggets.
The Kings shot 56% and the Nuggets shot 58%. So the Hornets are quite fortunate they ended up with a split of those games.
This is who they are.
James Borrego made a hard choice
Borrego didn’t wake up one day last summer saying, “I think I’ll stop defending the 3-point line just to see what happens.”
It was a difficult concession on Borrego’s part, after his first two seasons in Charlotte, that this roster didn’t have the defenders to focus on both the 3 and the rim. He tried to mask this team’s weakness for a while with a heavy dose of zone, but once scouting caught up to that tactic, he returned to more conventional switching man-to-man.
Basketball coaches generally go to zone out of necessity to mitigate a weakness. The weakness here was doing nothing of consequence in the off-season to improve rim-protection or defensive rebounding.
I understand why general manager Mitch Kupchak devoted so much salary-cap space to acquiring free agent Gordon Hayward once Hayward agreed to terms. However, there was around $4 million in room left over -- there still is -- and a veteran should have been acquired to address these screaming needs.
Drafting Vernon Carey and Nick Richards in the second round wasn’t a fix, at least not for now. They both might have a future, but thinking they’d do better in the here-and-now than Cody Zeller and Bismack Biyombo is wistful, not practical.
Borrego won’t change his stance on where the defense is focused; not because he’s stubborn but because he knows this thing could worsen from tinkering.
“If we’re just OK in the paint we (give up) 64 points in the paint,” Borrego said. “And it’s not just tonight; it will be tomorrow night (against the Los Angeles Lakers) same thing. Our full attention has to be on the paint...
“The way we’re constructed, we’re not going to be able to take away both (rim points and 3s) every single game. It’s not going to happen.”
‘Just bullied us, and we let it happen’
The Hornets are currently 18th among 30 NBA teams in defensive efficiency, allowing 1.091 points per possession. At 20-19, they have played enough games to project that’s roughly who they will be the rest of the season.
That made for an embarrassing outcome Wednesday, when Denver center Nikola Jokic assembled a triple-double in 29 minutes.
“They really just bullied us, and we let it happen,” said Hornets guard Malik Monk.
The Hornets, fifth in the Eastern Conference standings, are good enough offensively to break this four-season streak with no playoff appearances. If they slip, it won’t be because of their scoring, but because the margin for error in this defense is so small.
“Super-small,” Monk described. “We can’t have two or three mistakes in a row on the defensive end. When that happens, we let that dictate our offense, and then our offense is terrible.”
Wednesday, most everything was terrible. They’re not as bad as they appeared in Denver.
But what made them bad in Denver was no one-game thing.
