Charlotte Hornets’ road to failure starts by throwing the ball away

Considering how sloppy they were with the ball (18 turnovers) and how poorly they shot (42 percent), it was no mystery the Charlotte Hornets were going to lose Saturday to the Washington Wizards.

The mystery was how they somehow managed to trail by a point with under three minutes left.

The Wizards are a fragile team this season and they have a slew of injuries, most notably Bradley Beal’s stress reaction. But they do one thing extremely well: Turn you over and convert those changes of possession into points.

By the end of this 109-101 Charlotte loss, the Wizards had converted those 18 turnovers into 30 Washington points. That’s remarkable efficiency for the home team, remarkable inefficiency by the road team.

The 15-11 Hornets are different this season: Lots more offensive firepower and abundant depth. But they’re not a very good road team. They are 4-7 away from Time Warner Cable Arena and January is going to be a bear: Eleven of 16 on the road including two West Coast trips.

Play like they did Saturday on the road against the Golden State Warriors or Los Angeles Clippers, and they won’t be down three in the fourth quarter, they’ll be down 30.

Hornets coach Steve Clifford saw this one coming: The Hornets turned the ball over 19 times in the previous meeting this season with the Wizards. They managed to get away that night with a home victory, but Clifford kept repeating pre-game, both to his players and to the media, how crucial ball-security would be Saturday.

You give up the ball at mid-court to the Wizards and point guard John Wall (27 points and 12 assists) becomes a devastating one-man fast break. He set the tone in the first half with 20 points and six assists.

Clifford said there is no way his team will improve its road record without an attitude adjustment: They have to cut down on these turnovers and they have to get their defense set, rather than give up the 18 fast-break points the Wizards scored Saturday.

The Hornets continue to commit the fewest turnovers in the NBA (12.6 per game entering Saturday). But once in every four or five games they have an outlier like this game where their passes aren’t precise. The starting backcourt of Kemba Walker and Nic Batum each committed four turnovers. Backup point guard Jeremy Lin committed three.

You would expect those three to have the most turnovers since they handle the ball the most. But by themselves they committed nearly as many giveaways as the entire team averages.

The off-season makeover of this roster has been a success. For the 14^th time this season, they reached 10 3-point shots made (although the ratio – 10 makes to 33 attempts – left much to be desired).

For all the beauty this offense now has, there’s an accompanying sense of risk. The one thing you could count on from Clifford’s previous two teams was a sense of compliance.

You can’t count on that now, at least yet, and that’s going to be a problem when out of town.

This story was originally published December 19, 2015 at 10:30 PM with the headline "Charlotte Hornets’ road to failure starts by throwing the ball away."