When 113 NBA players voted, the Charlotte Hornets earned an unwelcome title
The Charlotte Hornets are a bad team. That’s not news. They had the NBA’s third-worst record this past season. They have an active streak of nine straight seasons without a playoff appearance — the longest such streak in the NBA.
What is a little surprising to me, though, is what a national poll featuring players from all 30 NBA teams just showed: NBA players consider the Hornets to be the league’s very worst organization.
The poll was conducted by the media outlet The Athletic, which surveyed 158 players in the NBA (more than a third of all its players) in March and April on a variety of topics. Not every player answered every question, but enough did that the results are interesting in a “pulse of the league” sort of way.
The Hornets barely were relevant to the survey at all except for one key question: “What is the league’s worst organization?”
In that one, the Hornets were the league’s runaway winner.
Charlotte got 38.1% of the votes cast by the NBA players, who were all allowed to vote anonymously. The Washington Wizards were voted second-worst with 20.4%, the New Orleans Pelicans were third with 11.5% and the Sacramento Kings were fourth with 8.8%. In other words, the Hornets garnered nearly as many “worst” votes from the 113 NBA players who answered that question as the next three teams did combined. (If you’re curious, NBA players voted Golden State, Oklahoma City and Boston the league’s best organizations, in that order).
So what do you make of all this?
Having been around the Hornets pretty consistently for three decades, I can tell you that the current incarnation isn’t nearly as dysfunctional as a few of the previous versions have been. People who work there mostly get along. Despite the occasional misfire, the off-the-court stuff is mostly in line with other NBA teams, and sometimes better. The Hornets’ community service is strong. And in my view, the Hornets’ in-game experience on an average day this past season was better than, say, the average experience for a Panthers’ game-day attendee. I’ve seen worse, in other words.
But what the Hornets have to combat nationally — and really haven’t been able to for the past decade — is a well-deserved reputation as losers. They lose and they lose and they lose. They were 19-63 this past season under first-year coach Charles Lee, for a team that many at least inside the Hornets’ building expected would win at least 35 games. They haven’t gotten to even 30 wins for three years in a row. Back when Michael Jordan owned the team, the Hornets once went 7-59 in a season so awful that a movie got made about it.
The Hornets are about to throw their hat into the Cooper Flagg lottery on May 12. They have a 14% chance of changing the course of their franchise by earning the right to select the Duke superstar in the NBA Draft Lottery.
Grabbing Flag would be the easiest way to erase this “worst organization” idea, because ultimately it’s all about winning, and Flagg would help greatly in that respect. Winning is the currency of the NBA and really of all professional sports. Don’t give us the excuses. Show us the W’s. There are only so many seasons where you can say “But we had a lot of injuries!” before people tune it out.
So by the purely “wins vs. losses” measure, The Athletic’s poll was accurate. NBA players want to get paid, sure. We all do. But they care mostly about winning when it comes to organizations — who does, who doesn’t.
As the story points out, the Hornets and the Pelicans are the only two NBA teams that have never even made it to a conference final. Think of that. The Charlotte franchise has played 35 seasons in Charlotte, under one last name or another, and they’ve never made it to either the NBA Finals or even the NBA’s version of the Final Four. Even during the relatively brief Alonzo Mourning-Larry Johnson-Muggsy Bogues-Dell Curry era, they didn’t make it to an Eastern Conference final.
So yeah, hearing that you’re the worst organization in the NBA, as voted on by roughly a quarter of the league’s own players? That’s gotta hurt the Hornets.
But there’s only one way to fix it: Figure out how to win. A successful Hail Mary on May 12 sure would help.
