Yet again ‘closers’ and ‘Hornets’ just don’t fit in the same sentence

A lot has changed about the Charlotte Hornets this season: They take more 3-pointers. They switch constantly on defense. The bench is no longer a liability.

Here’s what hasn’t changed: They still can’t be trusted to win a close game.

A 19-point second-half lead isn’t impenetrable in the NBA. But at home, against an Oklahoma City Thunder team that entered this game at 2-4, it should have been sufficient. Instead, the Hornets lost 111-107 at Spectrum Center.

They are 4-5, but they are also 1-4 in games decided by four points or less this season. That is certainly nothing new. The inability to manage tight games late haunted them most of the past two seasons.

Thursday they led 66-47 with 19 1/2 minutes left in this game, on a reverse layup by Kemba Walker. Despite the Thunder holding Walker, the NBA’s second-leading scorer entering this game, to no field goals in the first half, this one looked comfortable.

Then the Hornets’ defense went into free-fall. In the second half, the Thunder made 27 of 50 shots from the field. It was predictable that Russell Westbrook (29 points, 10 assists and eight rebounds) would have a huge game. But the Hornets got beaten in the second half by a combined 32 points by reserves Dennis Schroder and Alex Abrines.

Schroder is now the Thunder’s backup point guard following a salary dump by the Atlanta Hawks. He made five of his nine second-half shots, which irked Hornets coach James Borrego.

“The problem I have tonight was Schroder getting to the rim too much (and) too easy,” Borrego said. “And Abrines 5-of-10 from 3.”

Big question, no answer

Walker finished this game with 21 points, about nine below his average this season. The Thunder over-played him defensively, “blitzing” him in pick-and-rolls. This has happened often the past five games or so in response to Walker’s prolific scoring this season. Walker said what the Thunder did wasn’t particularly different, but it did have the effect of making him give up the ball in the first half.

Walker took only three shots from the field before halftime and missed them all. He ended this game 1-of-7 from 3-point range. But as Borrego said, Walker’s shooting wasn’t ultimately why they lost. It was a defense that imploded, giving up 38 Thunder points in the fourth quarter.

“We took it possession-by-possession and our energy off the bench was (amazing),” said Schroder, who finished with 21 points and five assists.

Why couldn’t/didn’t the Hornets match that energy, particularly at home?

“I don’t know. We have to find a way (to eke out close games), to get stops and put the ball in the basket,” Walker said of the close losses. “We just have to be better down the stretch. We have to want these games, we have to try to get these games.

“A lot of times it’s there for us.”

Nothing new

Indeed, it is there for them, but close ones slip through their hands like so many grains of sand. Borrego knew that when he took this job. I asked him pre-game Thursday what it would take to start replicating the one-point victory they had the first week of the season in Miami.

“A lot of times, it’s just about making a play, making a shot,” said Borrego, who was an assistant with a San Antonio Spurs organization that won a slew of close ones the past decade.

“I think we saw that in the Philadelphia game (a two-point loss). I thought we executed pretty well offensively, had some good looks, but they just didn’t fall that night. When those shots aren’t falling, you’ve got to find a way to close that game out defensively. Get a stop, get a steal, get a rebound...

“That’s really the next phase for us as a team.”

Oh, it’s a phase, all right. One that has dogged these guys constantly. They are really good at building big leads, and still really fragile at protecting them.

How much more sand must sift through this team’s fingers before this thing gets fixed?

This story was originally published November 1, 2018 at 11:23 PM with the headline "Yet again ‘closers’ and ‘Hornets’ just don’t fit in the same sentence."