Terry Rozier wishes the Hornets knew how special the playoffs are. Urgency is missing
Something didn’t feel right.
Knowing the situation they were immersed in should have had the Charlotte Hornets ready for what was in front of them Tuesday night. Here they were, welcoming in one of the teams picked to be championship contenders, yet has floundered enough to the point their matchup with the Hornets represented a battle for eighth place in the Eastern Conference.
With the season rapidly winding down and each holding a precious significance, a sense of desperation should’ve been anticipated. For whatever reason, the Hornets were inexplicably flat from the opening toss against Brooklyn. When they finally woke up from an evening nap that dropped them into a 34-point hole, it was too late.
This wasn’t the kind of effort that should be accepted by a team filled with postseason hopes. In their 132-121 loss to the Nets, the Hornets didn’t look like a team trying to pull itself into playoff relevancy. Instead, they kept in tune with a season-long trend that may annihilate those postseason thoughts that have danced in their heads sporadically over the past couple of months.
“I just wish that every guy in that locker room knew how special the playoffs were because we’d have a sense of urgency from the beginning,” Terry Rozier said. “Just to be in that light and just to play in it is special. I could talk about it all the time, but if we don’t get there then it don’t mean nothing. But we have to take care of right now and we’ll be fine. But we’ve just got to play with that sense of urgency. We’ve got to play like losing is not an option. So we’ve just got to pick that up.”
In more ways than one. Everybody had a part in the Hornets’ 12th loss in their last 16 games and a defeat that ended their mini two-game winning streak, contributing their share of negative plays.
Unconscionable turnovers, sometimes happening on successive possessions because they played like they wanted to get it all back at once. Throwing ill-advised passes instead of taking the safe play. Atrocious defense that allowed Kyrie Irving to drop in 50 points and drain a season-best nine 3-pointers, while Andre Drummond roasted them for a season-high 20 points and 14 rebounds.
Considering the circumstances, these are not the kind of mistakes you’d envision from the Hornets (32-34).
“Yeah, it’s surprising but it’s nothing that we can’t fix,” Hornets forward Miles Bridges said. “Everybody coming in with the right mindset — to move the ball, play defense, just do all the winning plays and not worry about ourselves. And we came out selfishly today.”
It’s on everybody — players and the coaching staff — to establish more consistency and command of things because adjustments against Brooklyn didn’t produce much tangible results. Even the decision to intentionally foul Drummond and put him on the free-throw line late in the fourth quarter backfired when he drained three of four attempts.
Defensively, the Hornets were lackadaisical. They were too slow in their rotations, often leaving a 3-point shooter — Irving, Patty Mills and Seth Curry among them — open and allowing the Nets to drain 18 of 35 attempts. It led to groans from many of the 17,230 fans in the Spectrum Center crowd, all too familiar with the Hornets’ 22nd-ranked defensive rating.
“When you have two elite players like (Kevin) Durant and Irving, you can either play one-on-one and take your chances or you can double team and give something up,” Hornets coach James Borrego said. “When you do that, there will be rotations. But we are going to be in rotations sometimes unless you want to play one-on-one against Irving and Durant, and to me that is not how we will be successful.”
Here’s how they can: Show a little more want to. Take it personal when you’re scored on. Dig down deeper.
“It’s not really challenging,” Bridges said. “You just have to have the will to get up and say I’m playing today, and I’m going to go there with urgency, a sense of urgency and trying to win. I feel like the more we drill that into each other the more times we’ll come out ready to go. But it’s getting late, so we’ve got to do it now.”
A ninth-place position with 16 games remaining isn’t the most ideal of scenarios. The journey to their hopeful destination is littered with speed bumps, and it has Rozier trying to constantly explain the significance of the reward. He’s one of the few Hornets with postseason experience and desires to be on that stage again.
“I don’t want to bring up too much of playoff, playoff, playoff,” Rozier said, “because we need to worry about today, and tomorrow when we wake up we need to worry about tomorrow. We don’t need to worry about so much down the line. But it would help just for guys to understand how big it is to get there and there’s nothing like playoff basketball.
“I’m sure guys on our team, when they see the playoffs, they see the difference on TV. It’s special. We’ve just got to take it day-by-day. I’ve got to be better in the locker room in just making sure that guys understand we need this. We need this win, so I’ve got to be one of those guys.”
This story was originally published March 9, 2022 at 8:39 AM.
