What the short-handed Hornets did Friday shows why they’re going to make the playoffs
.JPG "Charlotte Hornets forward Miles Bridges reacts during the second half of an NBA basketball game against the Sacramento Kings on Friday in Charlotte. Bridges scored 23 points and had eight assists as the Hornets won, 124-123.")
How the Charlotte Hornets won an NBA game Friday night defies logical explanation, both on a macro and micro level.
But somehow they did, edging Sacramento 124-123, in a victory that in April will still stand as one of this season’s most memorable. “It’s probably the most proud I’ve been of a team in my four years here,” Charlotte coach James Borrego said afterward.
We’re only a third of the way through the NBA regular season, but a game like Friday night showed us that Charlotte (15-13) really should make the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
Good teams do things like this, winning when they shouldn’t. The Hornets’ coaching staff has been smart enough to adjust in a wild week, and there’s been enough help on the bench to be able to perform the adjustments.
In a global sense, what happened Friday night made little sense. Nor did the game’s ending.
In the final 5.5 seconds, with the game tied at 123, the Hornets had to survive getting a basket taken away by a weird officiating reversal (a foul on Sacramento wasn’t taken away, but the basket was). Cody Martin then made the second of two free throws, which gave Charlotte a one-point lead.
But then Martin committed a terrible foul in the backcourt, one so poor that he kept getting asked after the game if he had done it on purpose. He hadn’t; he had just tried to make an ill-advised steal.
Martin’s foul in the backcourt put Sacramento’s best player, De’Aaron Fox, on the free-throw line for two foul shots with 2.4 seconds left and a chance to win the game.
Fox, a 74% free throw shooter, was 8-for-8 from the line and already had scored 31 points.
“In my head, I was thinking that I was going to make these two and get out of here,” Fox said later.
Instead, he missed both as a Spectrum Center crowd of 16,335 shrieked in delight, hitting the back rim on the first one and short-arming the second one off the front rim. Then Sacramento missed two point-blank tip-ins and the Hornets instead got out of there with an unlikely victory.
“I think the basketball gods were in our favor,” said Martin, who had Charlotte’s final four points.
“We were very fortunate,” Borrego said, which was a funny but true thing to say on a night when half the Hornets team was gone.
The win put the Hornets at 2-2 since they were temporarily decimated by losing four of their key players due to the NBA’s health and safety COVID-19 protocols. That they’ve managed to not lose any real ground — and even had a realistic shot at winning all four LaMelo-less games — is remarkable.
The four short-handed Hornets games have had all sorts of surprises, including Charlotte rookie shooting guard James Bouknight. He went off for a team-high 24 points Friday night after having more DNP-CDs (17) then points (15) in Charlotte’s first 27 games combined.
“The feeling is kind of surreal,” Bouknight said after making 6-of-8 three-pointers. “But I knew I was capable of this.”
Sacramento had drilled a full-strength Hornets team by 30 points only a month ago. And the Charlotte team playing Friday was nothing like that one — it was missing seven players due to COVID-19 health and safety protocols and unrelated illnesses.
You could have fielded a quality NBA team with the Hornets who were absent Friday: LaMelo Ball, Terry Rozier, Mason Plumlee, Ish Smith, PJ Washington, Jalen McDaniels and Nick Richards. Borrego said that list constituted seven of the Hornets’ top 10 rotation players.
That meant Borrego was playing rookie JT Thor 28 minutes in a tight game Friday and somebody named Arnoldas Kulboka for a forgettable 2:43. Rookie Kai Jones played six minutes, all in the fourth quarter, and had a bizarre tip-in. Vernon Carey Jr. started. Martin played a kind of quasi-point guard role and did so for 43 mostly efficient minutes.
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It wasn’t the sort of lineup that inspires confidence. But it worked, and it will probably need to work again vs. Dallas Monday because the Hornets may not get the bulk of their players back until Wednesday, when the 10-day NBA protocol has expired. At some point in the next few days things will become normal again, with LaMelo leading every highlights package and the other players settling back into more familiar roles.
But this week has showed us that these Hornets, once they get to the playoffs as they should, will have enough resiliency to at least have a chance at winning a postseason series. The playoffs are often about situations like this, where the unexpected occurs and the team that adjusts most effectively wins.
Sure, the Hornets were lucky Friday night. But they were also very good.
