For the first time in a long, long, long — take a deep breath — long time, the Charlotte Hornets are playing sustained winning basketball.
And now, after their 118-89 demolition of the Boston Celtics on Wednesday night inside TD Garden, the Hornets are officially a winning team, too.
A little more than three months after starting the season 4-14, the Hornets (32-21) are above .500 in March for the first time since the 2021-22 season.
Charlotte has not only been one of the best teams in basketball since the end of November, but it’s also been objectively dominant while doing it. That case was furthered by Wednesday’s rout of the Celtics, who rank second in the Eastern Conference standings.
Dating to Nov. 28, the Hornets rank seventh in the NBA in win percentage (.622) while sitting fourth in point differential (plus-340) and sporting a top-four offense.
The reasons for their success have been myriad. On most nights, sharpshooting rookie sensation Kon Knueppel leads the way with his composed savvy and high basketball IQ. Other nights, third-year forward Brandon Miller continues illustrating why Charlotte drafted him second in 2024.
Coach Charles Lee has done a great job maximizing players such as starting center Moussa Diabaté, whom Charlotte picked up via a two-way contract less than two years ago but trusts to anchor the team’s interior. Veterans LaMelo Ball and Miles Bridges can warrant mixed reviews, but their on-court performances have helped round out one of the league’s most potent five-player lineups this season.
Before Wednesday’s win over Boston, that unit outscored opponents by 30.7 points per 100 possessions over a 290-minute sample, according to NBA.com. No lineup across the league with even a 100-minute sample sports a net rating higher than plus-25.3 (the defending champion Oklahoma City Thunder).
Beyond that, though, the Hornets are showing on a routine basis that they’re no longer settling for rebuilds and being on the wrong side of blowouts. At 32-31, this is the latest in a season they’ve been over .500 since the tail end of the 2021-22 campaign. Before that? You have to go back to the stretch run of the 2015-16 season.
Entering this season, Charlotte ranked last in win percentage from 2004 to 2025 (.388), finished .500 or better only four times and has made only three postseason appearances. The franchise’s last playoff appearance was 10 years ago, and its last postseason series win was in 2002. Could this be the year both droughts come to an end?
Impressive wins over the Cleveland Cavaliers, Los Angeles Lakers, San Antonio Spurs, Houston Rockets, Oklahoma City and Boston have proved this isn’t just a case of the Hornets’ catching lightning in a bottle. Rather, they’ve found a real core to win around.
Knueppel, Miller and Diabaté provide three key elements for any basketball team: sound floor-spacing (Knueppel), effective isolation scoring (Miller) and consistent interior play (Diabaté). Recent pickups such as seventh-year guard Coby White (17 points off the bench Wednesday) only add to the vital combination of youth and talent for a Hornets team sizing up a run for the Eastern Conference’s No. 6 seed.
Charlotte’s 22 double-digit wins are only four shy of the highest single-season total in franchise history. Its 12 20-point victories are already a team record.
Naturally, there are still ways for the Hornets to improve, namely in close games. Such strides are made through reps, though. Their 9-16 record in clutch-time games is alongside the likes of the league-worst Sacramento Kings and lowly Brooklyn Nets. In such situations, Knueppel (35.9 percent) and Miller (22.7) can and should improve, but time will tell as the Hornets ride the highs and lows of molding a young, promising core into a sustained winner.
Knueppel is making his case for Rookie of the Year one 3-pointer at a time. Along with leading the league in 3s and making well over 40.0 percent of his long-range looks, he’s on pace to join Zion Williamson, Bill Cartwright and Adrian Dantley as the only rookies to average at least 19 points with a true shooting percentage of at least 60.0 percent, per Basketball Reference.
Miller’s still learning to hone his own efficiency, but the Hornets are simply better when he’s getting buckets, as evidenced by their 20-7 mark when he scores at least 20 points. That record would put them on pace for a .741 win percentage over a full season. A key element to that has been Miller finding his stride as a pull-up jump shooter. In Charlotte’s wins this season, he’s making 44.9 percent of his pull-up shots and 44.8 percent of such looks from deep. Over his first two seasons, those figures were 38.5 and 30.7 percent.
Even if the Hornets finish only .500 on the season, the reasons would be more promising than any iteration of basketball they’ve played in years. Where they go from here depends on how well Lee continues meshing a bevy of promising talent into a team that can someday help Hugo the Hornet entertain us during a deep postseason run.