
CHARLOTTE — When the cleansing refresh of a new year has arrived but a team only has one meager win to show for itself since Thanksgiving, it’s fair to say that the season might have already gone down the tubes.
The midseason of the Charlotte Hornets’ 2024-25 campaign quickly approaches as the freefalling team (7-27) finds itself facedown on the ground weighed down by a 10-game losing streak, a 2-18 record in its past 20 games, and a general sense of directionless aim as poor shooting and injury woes doom the rotation night in and night out.
It hasn’t been a great start for first-year coach Charles Lee and his floundering squad, which has struggled so mightily throughout the first two and a half months of the season that the Queen City franchise already feels like it’s flirting with tank mode by early January.
Ranked 29th in offense (105.8 ppg) and 15th in defense (112.5 ppg), the Hornets have failed to win back-to-back games since Nov. 6-8 and are closely resembling last season’s uneven squad that had a similar 8-26 record at this same exact point in the year.
“We’ve talked about being able to sustain our effort, our focus, competitiveness, our togetherness,” Lee said after his team’s 115-105 loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse on Sunday night.
Through a rocky period of sustained injuries, the game marked only the seventh time over the last year-plus that Charlotte’s core four of LaMelo Ball, Brandon Miller, Miles Bridges, and Mark Williams have been together on the floor at the same time.
“We’re just trying out how to embrace some of that physicality and also learn just how to reset and refocus as another team goes on a run,” Lee added. “I think for a young group, it’s understanding, ‘Okay, these are the positives we kind of had to build ourselves a lead. They are making a run and now we just need to reset and refocus then go on our run.’”
In a season that has now coagulated into a miserable skid, Charlotte’s 125-119 road loss to Milwaukee back on Nov. 23 now stands out as a turning point for the worse. In retrospect, it was probably a harbinger of misfortune to come that Ball exploded for a career-high 50 points and yet the team still managed to lose.
However, the Hornets were only 6-10 at that point; not exactly close to the disaster zone that Charlotte has nosedived into since then.
Beyond the game that contained Ball’s grand performance for the ages, that Saturday night in November also stands as the contest where forward Grant Williams suffered a season-ending ACL tear in right knee, unknowingly at the time casting a shadow over the Hornets that still looms large.
The Charlotte native wasn’t exactly lighting the world on fire with his 10.3 points and 5.1 rebounds per game, but his absence during the 18 games since his injury indicates that he meant more to the squad’s overall performance than what was previously assumed.
“It’s definitely emotional,” Lee said of his outlook directly following Williams’ early-season exit. “I kind of caught myself feeling a little emotional after the Milwaukee game because he’s had such a great impact on everything we’ve done, especially since I’ve been hired here. He’s one of the veteran voices in the locker room that’s just been in a lot of different moments and had a lot of different experiences with the several teams he’s been with.”
As the second half of the season nears, Charlotte has to find some way to get over the hump of coming up short in nearly every matchup it plays.
Perhaps Ball, Miller, Bridges, and Williams can finally jell and develop their on-court chemistry that has been hampered over and over. Each player has had flashes of brilliance throughout the season, although none have had it occur at the same time.
Lee and his coaching staff are in desperate need for the team’s bench players to step up their game.
Backup point guard Tre Mann was answering the call with an average of over 14 points per game in his nightly 24 minutes prior to his back injury; he is expected to be re-evaluated next week to estimate his potential return to the court.
This is the time for players like Josh Green, Cody Martin, Vasilije Micic, and Nick Richards to take some pressure off the core four by holding their own, giving the Hornets some much-needed production before the season slips off into a comatose state that rivals some of the worst seasons Charlotte has ever had.