Think of your wildest possible Charlotte Hornets outcomes from the preseason. Most of us hoped that the team would be marginally better in Charles Lee’s second year. Even the most optimistic among us were only confident in a tightly contested Play-In berth.
After a few weeks, it began to look like this Hornets team was just as bad as the others, and all the optimism from a good summer evaporated. A 4-14 start and injuries to Brandon Miller and LaMelo Ball will do that to a team.
If, after that point, you believed the Hornets would still be fine, you might want to try your hand at being a psychic. There were little signs of life, and yet, as the regular season winds down, the Hornets just cracked the top 10 in Bleacher Report’s NBA Power Rankings.
Being in the top 10 at any point this season would’ve sent a Hornets fan into a coma during the offseason. It happening with 20 games to go is just the unexpected cherry on top.
But at this point, it’s impossible to argue against the ranking. Sure, it’s a bit of recency bias, but the Hornets have been playing excellent ball since that 4-14 start, and they’ve been basically the NBA’s best team since January 1.
They’re 28-17 since that 4-14 start. They deserve a top-10 ranking like Andy Bailey gave them, and he so graciously detailed just why a 32-win team should be ranked among the best of the best.
“When every member of the current starting five (LaMelo Ball, Kon Knueppel, Brandon Miller, Miles Bridges, and Moussa Diabaté) is available, the Charlotte Hornets play like a juggernaut,” Bailey wrote. The Hornets have lost twice with that starting five.
He continued, “There’s shot creation, shooting, and passing all over that lineup. It features plenty of switchability. And Diabaté has seemingly come out of nowhere to become one of the East’s more dynamic rim-running, rim-protecting bigs at the middle of it.”
Bailey pointed out that that five-man unit is an astonishing +30.4 per 100 possessions. Basically, if those five could play all 48 minutes, the Hornets would beat everyone by about 30 points on a nightly basis.
Even though they can’t do that, we’re seeing that sort of dominance by everyone involved. Even the bench is throttling folks. They’ve collectively, starters and backups, won six in a row by more than 16 points, the second-longest streak in NBA history.
The cold start means the Hornets can’t justifiably be ranked much higher than 10, even if it is largely based on recency bias. But since January 1, there are only a handful of teams even on the same level as Charlotte.
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