Photo by Dustin Satloff/Getty Images
The Hornets used to be fun. Not anymore.
It’s time for me to let the Hornets go for the remainder of the 2022-23 season. This team has officially broken me, and that brings me absolutely no joy. Once a high-flying, white-hot ball of excitement, the team is now a hollow shell of unwatchable mediocrity — and it didn’t have to be this way.
The Hornets are one of the worst teams in the NBA, but that isn’t why I can’t stand watching them. I’ve watched a lot of terrible teams over the years, willingly, and in every case they were at least entertaining. I don’t know if I can say that about the 2022-23 Hornets. Sure, they’re keeping games close — but only insofar that it brings fleeting moments of hope before incalculable disappointment. Tanking is a good thing this season, but it’s cold comfort.
Everything that’s happened to the Hornets over the last six months, self-inflicted and by happenstance, has streamlined this team into being damn near unwatchable. It all starts with LaMelo Ball, which is the reason you watch this team play basketball — and his absence due to injury has highlighted just how dynamic a superstar he is with his passing creativity taking an otherwise mediocre team to a whole other level.
With any hope Melo will return soon, but it’s not enough to save the team from its next biggest problem: No second star. This I absolutely can’t blame the Hornets for, and on the contrary I’m incredibly happy the team took a hard-line stance when it comes to Miles Bridges. They didn’t put his on-court performance above his reprehensible domestic violence charges, even when he was so important to the future of the team he likely would have gotten a max contract.
That said, it still doesn’t make the on-court product better. The team’s two leading scorers, Kelly Oubre Jr. and Terry Rozier operate independently from LaMelo Ball, rather than in concert. Neither player move off the ball the same way Bridges did, or operate in the inside in a way that helped LeMelo showcase his passing ability to thread the ball in traffic. Oubre and Rozier are happier to work in iso and drive themselves, or stick to the perimeter to pick their shots.
So you have this weirdly constructed team now that’s kind of at odds with itself, and at the center is head coach Steve Clifford. This was absolutely the wrong hire, and hell the Hornets know it themselves. After firing James Borrego for not moving the team forward fast enough, GM Mitch Kupchack and Michael Jordan were poised to make a fantastic hire in luring assistant Kenny Atkinson away from the Golden State Warriors.
Atkinson had previous head coaching experience with the Nets, where he took a talent-bereft team and made them swing way above their weight class, even though there were lacking results. In 2018-19 he led the team to the playoffs with little more than D’Angelo Russell and an island of misfit toys, and the belief was that this ability, paired with legitimate superstar experience with the Warriors would take Ball and Co. to the next level. Unfortunately it blew up in the Hornets’ faces, with Atkinson leaving Charlotte accepting the head coach job, but crucially not signing a contract — having a change of heart and electing to stay with Golden State.
This sent the Hornets front office into a tailspin, and they ended up making a desperation hire to bring back Steve Clifford, who led the Hornets to five mediocre seasons. A defensive-minded coach with little time for dynamic offense, Clifford was the worst possible person to turn a young, offensively dynamic team over to.
So far this season Clifford has made the Hornets boring as hell. He’s slowed down the offense, dropping the team from 6th in the NBA in pace to 14th. There’s less of an emphasis on scoring in transition, which has caused Charlotte to drop from 4th in points-per-game a year ago to 25th now — and that might be palatable if the defense has taken major strides forward, and yet the Hornets are allowing 0.5 more points-per-game than they did a year ago. Sure, some of this can be chalked up to the seemingly never-ending injury issues Charlotte has, but that’s a pretty shaky excuse for all the problems this team has.
Hell, I could even stomach this a little more if during the team tanking effort there was a focus on getting the Hornets’ young players minutes to better evaluate the roster — but that’s not even happening. James Bouknight has only appeared in 19 games, Kai Jones is getting less than 10 minutes per, and 2022 first round pick Mark Williams was assigned to the Hornets’ G-League affiliate — all so Mason Plumless could eat up the big man minutes.
I hope and pray this tank works. That some good can come out of all this. I’m not asking for Victor Wembanyama, even though he’s everyone’s dream — just give me a really good-ass player who can help LaMelo Ball free this team from this soul-crushing mediocrity.
True pain in sports isn’t just losing. It’s being shown something beautiful and watch it all slip away. That’s what’s happened with the Hornets over the last six months, and I just can’t stand it.
