What is the deal with the Charlotte Hornets?
By Jared Dubin
After a stirring, comeback win over the Toronto Raptors on Wednesday night (44 points in the fourth!), the Charlotte Hornets are now sporting a 34-41 record. They’re tied for 10th place in the Eastern Conference and — acknowledging the fact that they sit three games back of the eighth place Miami Heat with seven games left in their season — they seem almost sure to see their season end without a playoff berth.
The Hornets, though, have actually outscored their opponents on the season, and have the sixth-best point differential in the conference. Per Basketball-Reference, a team with Charlotte’s point differential would actually be projected to go 40-35 (this is called Pythagorean Expectation), meaning the Hornets have underperformed by six wins in 75 games.
If that figure holds over their final seven games of the year, they’ll become just the 10th team in the last decade to see a negative spread that large between their actual record and their Pythagorean expectation. (During the same period of time, six teams have outperformed their point differential by six wins or more.)
Almost all of this underperformance has come since the calendar flipped to 2017. Since Jan. 1, the Hornets have been outscored by a grand total of 19 points across 41 games. Given that scoring differential, you’d “expect” the Hornets to be 20-21 in those 41 contests. But they’re not 20-21 in those games. They’re actually just 15-26, having underperformed their point differential by an incredible five wins in what amounts to half a season’s worth of games. That’s crazy!
This all begs the question: just what the heck is going on here? Let’s dig into some numbers.
We’ll start with pace. As has been established over the years, games with fewer possessions tend to drive more random results. The more possessions in a game, the greater chance for the team with better talent to assert that talent advantage, thus reducing randomness. The average Hornets game that season has featured exactly 98 possessions, per NBA.com. In a league-wide context, that is neither a lot nor a little. The average NBA game this season has contained 98.7 possessions per game. Sure, the Hornets’ games have been slightly slower than average, but not by enough to drive their six-game underperformance. So, that’s not it.
Another source of randomness could be fouls. If a term is overly reliant on drawing the whistle, or if it sends its opponents to the line ad nauseam, it could be subject to the whims of a particular refereeing crew on any given night. (Doubly so on defense, because a team has no control over the free throw percentage of its opponent.) The Hornets, though, take about an average amount of free throws both per game and as a percentage of their shot attempts, and they actually have the most foul-averse defense in the entire league. Not only that but their opponents have connected on free throws at almost exactly a league average rate. So, that’s not it, either.
Next, we’ll move to 3-pointers. The 3-pointer is a higher-variance shots than any those inside the arc, and the more 3-pointers taken in a given game, the greater the chance for an unexpected result. If a team’s games feature a ton of 3-pointers, that could potentially drive randomness over the course of a season.
The Hornets have attempted 28.7 3-pointers per game this season, eighth-most in the league. To give you some context, though, the difference between the Hornets and the second-place Cavaliers (33.6 per game) is just about equal to the distance between the Hornets and the 24th-ranked Bucks (23.4 per game). The NBA average this season is actually 26.9 per game. So, Charlotte shoots a bunch of 3s, sure, but not an overwhelming amount. The Hornets’ opponents, however, do take a lot of treys. No team has allowed its opponents to hoist from beyond the arc more often. Hornets opponents have launched an NBA-high 31.3 deep balls a night.
At 60 a night, Hornets games feature the fourth-most combined 3-point attempts per game in the league. Still, an average of six more attempted 3s per game doesn’t seem like enough on its own to doom the Hornets’ record in this fashion. There’s got to be more.
The answer, it seems, lies in “clutch time.” The Hornets have played 48 games that have been within five points and some point during the final five minutes of regulation or overtime, more than every team in the NBA except the Wizards. A team’s record in these games tends to regress toward .500 over time, but in a smaller sample, there can be a lot of variance. And surprise, surprise: the Hornets are six games under .500 in clutch time games this season, having won 21 of 48 such games. It’s been even worse since Jan. 1; Charlotte has a putrid 9-17 record in clutch time games in 2017.
The issue, both over the course of the full season and in the new year, has been the same: Charlotte’s clutch time defense has been an abomination. Only the Lakers have allowed scoring at a greater rate per 100 possessions in the clutch this season, per NBA.com.
A few things have plagued the Hornets’ clutch time defense: first, they almost never force turnovers, which means that opponents have been given more chances to score than the average team. (Only the Knicks have forced turnovers less often in clutch time.) Charlotte also has not cleaned the defensive glass as well in the clutch as during the rest of the game, which means their opponents have gotten extra chances to score even when they’ve missed. Charlotte is second in defensive rebounding percentage overall this season, but only 22nd in clutch time. The Hornets are also one of the few teams whose opponents have shot better in the clutch than during the rest of the game. Charlotte opponents have registered an effective field goal percentage of 51.8 percent this season, and that figure rises to 54.8 percent in clutch situations, second-highest in the league.
Next: The delusions of tanking teams, and the virtue of effort
More often than not, a team experiencing abject failure in three of the “four factors” during close and late situations will have a dreadful defense, and that, in turn, will lead to an abundance of losses.
And that, good people, is probably why the Charlotte Hornets’ record doesn’t match their point differential.