As Charlotte Hornets prepare for ‘a great opportunity,’ one thing has to change
.JPG "Phoenix Suns forward Jalen Smith dunks over Charlotte Hornets center Mason Plumlee during the second half of an NBA basketball game on Sunday, Jan. 2, 2022, in Charlotte, N.C. Phoenix won, 133-99, as Smith had 19 points and 12 rebounds.")
For the first half of the NBA season, the Charlotte Hornets have reminded me of my kid who’s off at college.
Occasionally, he pops back into town for a day or two, hauling in a hamper full of dirty clothes and making a beeline for the refrigerator. But mostly he’s out of town, rumored to be doing OK.
That’s something like these Hornets, who will have played 24 road games and only 14 at home by the time they get back to Spectrum Center on Wednesday night for the first game of a three-game homestand.
The Hornets (19-18 before their game at Washington on Monday night) have mostly survived this road-heavy schedule.
As long as they don’t have to play Phoenix — the Suns torched the Hornets by 34 points before a disappointed sellout crowd in Charlotte on Sunday, two weeks after beating them by 31 — the Hornets have been pretty good. They have hung around the No. 6-No. 9 area of the Eastern Conference standings for most of the season.
Now, though, they are about to come home for an extended time, and that means it’s time to get serious.
“There’s a great opportunity right in front of us,” Hornets coach James Borrego said.
The Hornets play 61.4% of their remaining regular-season games in Charlotte, including home games Wednesday (Detroit), Saturday (Milwaukee) and Monday (Milwaukee again).
Their goal in these next three months must be to get out of the 7-10 range in the Eastern Conference, which puts you only into the postseason play-in tournament.
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As Charlotte knows from last season, when it made the play-in and quickly got bounced, that’s a place you don’t want to be. Charlotte needs to reach the No. 6 slot at least, to get into a true best-of-7 NBA playoff series for the first time since 2016.
To make the home-intensive schedule work in their favor, though, the Hornets have to play better defense. Too often this is a team whose definition of defense appears to be “I’ll just outscore the man I’m guarding, and that should be enough.”
Name almost any defensive rating metric and the Hornets are near the bottom of it.
“We’ve got to focus on defense more,” Charlotte forward Miles Bridges said Sunday, after the Hornets gave up 73 points to Phoenix in the first half and trailed by as many as 43 points in a blowout loss. “Our defense is what we struggle in. And if we get better at that, we can get out on transition offense, where nobody can stop us.”
That’s largely true. The Hornets are wildly entertaining, ranked second in the NBA in scoring at 114.7 points per game and drawing massive home crowds with regularity. They’re a long way from 7-59.
“We do have a lot of guys who can put the ball in the hole,” Bridges said.
But Charlotte is also an offense-first team that doesn’t grind out wins in the 90s when the ball isn’t going in, as it didn’t Sunday when Charlotte shot 9 for 35 from the 3-point line. When that happens, the Hornets just lose.
It’s easy to blame this on Charlotte’s chronic problem — the lack of a true defensive stopper at the center position. Mason Plumlee does his best, but it’s not enough.
Still, though, that’s only part of the defensive issues. The Hornets don’t rotate quickly enough and sometimes act as if they haven’t read those detailed analyses the assistant coaches are always providing. From LaMelo Ball and Bridges on down, the Hornets could be better on D.
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For instance, in that monstrosity of a Phoenix loss Sunday:
“Devin Booker, you’re supposed to make him a playmaker,” Bridges said. “But he was getting open shots that he can make in his sleep (Booker scored 24 points in 29 minutes). So we’ve just got to focus more on the scouting report.”
Phoenix (28-8) is an elite NBA team and a potential champion, so the degree of difficulty is high there. But the Hornets have to hold serve against woeful teams like Detroit Wednesday, and then try to at least split with Milwaukee, and then eventually put a little distance between themselves and that .500 mark they’ve been hanging around all year.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of this Hornets team. They’re talented and fun. At slightly above .500, their record is something the Carolina Panthers can only dream of.
But until they get better defensively, they’re going to keep spinning their wheels.
