Do the Charlotte Hornets have time to turn their season around? Here’s what they think
When the holiday season picks up steam, it coincides with the quarter pole of the average NBA schedule.
That’s where the Charlotte Hornets find themselves after Saturday night’s loss to Milwaukee, heading into their matchup with the LA Clippers on Monday. Specifically, the Hornets have completed 28% of their 2022-23 campaign and will have wrapped up one-third of it in exactly a week.
We’ve hit the portion of the season where you typically can begin pinpointing certain figures and characteristics that comprise a team’s best winning formula, those things that mathematically lead to victories more often than not. Like the number of points you have to score. Or the ballpark amount necessary defensively to have a legitimate chance.
What have the Hornets (7-16) been staring at for the past two months, dating back to training camp? Just ask coach Steve Clifford for any particulars he may have gathered in nearly two dozen games.
“We haven’t played enough lineups together,” Clifford said. “We have individual goals for the guys. But in terms of our group, we’ve had no continuity. So, it’s been hard to figure out. Usually by 15 games, you can say, ‘When we defensive rebound, we win.’ ‘When we don’t turn the ball over, we’re good.’ And we’ve been all over the place. So that’s a good question, but we are not there yet.”
Currently, the Hornets are a fingernail away from being the NBA’s cellar dweller, a distinction that belongs to fellow Southeast Division foe Orlando (5-19).
Injuries bite
Charlotte’s uneven play is largely tied to multiple injuries.
Between LaMelo Ball, Dennis Smith Jr. and Terry Rozier each missing time with sprained ankles, Cody Martin being unavailable all season with knee/quad issues and Gordon Hayward getting hurt once again — three times in nine weeks — the Hornets haven’t been lucky with injuries. Their main guys are at 70 missed games, a sum that’s growing by the day.
Absences have forced essentially everyone else on the roster to spring into, at times, non-stop action. Of the Hornets’ 16 players, only two of them have played in less than seven games.
The team’s myriad early-season circumstances could weigh on the Hornets and drag down their morale. But Clifford points to the Eastern Conference standings, reminding them these aren’t the days of yesteryear — or even eighth months ago, when a 43-39 record got them the No. 10 seed and sent them into the play-in tournament.
“You can’t fool players in this league,” Clifford said. “They know we need those guys back. They know that right now we have very little room for error. They also know when we’ve played well, we’ve won or given ourselves a chance to win.
“The East, from what I’ve seen, Boston is terrific, (Milwaukee) terrific. There’s some other teams that are really good. This isn’t like last year when there were four or five teams in the East who were just not very good at all, and so last year there were a lot of teams in the East you were going to beat up on. That’s not the case this year. So, I would say there’s a good chance you get in 10th or ninth under .500.”
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‘Everybody has faith’
Despite the outside noise and the exterior cries of frustration about the team’s direction, the Hornets insist they aren’t worrying. No frayed nerves or underlying resentment is bubbling up.
“I’m very optimistic, as is everybody else in the locker room, that we’re just getting started,” Kelly Oubre said. “Yeah we’ve lost some games, but we’re in a lot of games. We’ve probably lost some more than normal, but we’re still learning. We have younger guys who have never been in these positions who are getting opportunities to come and spread their wings.
“I feel like once we kind of get a game plan, get an identity and stick to that each and every night consistently, we’ll see the win column start to count up instead of us being below .500. It’s coming, though. I have faith. Everybody has faith.”
That conviction, they contend, hasn’t wavered. This despite losing 14 of 17 outings since that spirited victory over Golden State on Oct. 29.
“I feel like the Wizards game, that just gave us more confidence,” Jalen McDaniels said. “We really haven’t been playing a full 48 minutes each game, so that’s why we’ve been coming out with Ls. But every game we’ve been learning from it and just trying to apply it to the next game. Whether it’s defensive rebounding, they outrebounded us one game, we know we’ve got to box out, be on the glass, dive in. Whatever it is. So, I feel like it’s just learning from each game honestly.”
A flip side to the Hornets’ plight: They’ve been haunted in each of the past two years falling shy of not only making the actual eight-team playoffs field, but also missing out on hosting at least one play-in tournament game.
Although the multitude of educational, on-the-job training sessions this season have been beneficial to a point, compiling a too many can seriously damage the Hornets’ already waning chances to climb out of an early-season hole that has them nearly 10 games below .500 barely a week into December.
If Charlotte is going to salvage its season, the upcoming stretch during which four of six games are in Uptown is paramount — particularly before the Hornets embark on a six-game, West Coast trip that can have lasting implications on the rest of their season.
“There’s time,” Mason Plumlee said. “But like coach said, it gets late early, which I had never heard it put that way, but it makes a lot of sense. You don’t want to look back and say, ‘Man, if we could have pulled out two or three more in the first quarter of the season.’ Then that’s the difference between the play-in and the playoff or not being in the play-in, that’s significant. So every game matters. The Minnesota win wasn’t worth two. (Saturday’s) loss wasn’t worth two. So we’ve got to come back and beat the Clippers.”
