The Charlotte Hornets lost to the Boston Celtics 131-98 in a game where both teams played as few rotation players as possible.

The summary

The former Thunder boys Tre Mann and Vasilije Micic started strong with the first eight points for the Hornets. Payton Pritchard and Luke Kornet did the same for the Celtics. Brandon Miller took a turn for the Hornets with a couple of free throws, an alley oop, and a three, but the Hornets still couldn’t find an answer for Pritchard and Kornet on the other end. That duo scored 21 of the Celtics’ first 23 points and scored or assisted on every Celtics first quarter point. They led 30-24 after one.

The game went off the rails in the second quarter. After a couple of minutes, the Hornets started to turn the ball over as if it was their job. When they weren’t turning the ball over, they were playing sluggish offense that ended in bad, almost desperate shot attempts. The empty possessions let the Celtics get out and run, and that started an avalanche the Hornets couldn’t stop. Peyton Pritchard and Sam Hauser led the Celtics to a 39 point quarter that put them up by 26 at the half.

The Hornets started the second half with Brandon Miller, Miles Bridges, and Vasilije Micic on the bench to get them rested up for the last game of the season and definitely not to make sure the Hornets didn’t make a second half comeback. The Celtics led by as many as 30, but threes from Tre Mann and Davis Bertans cut into that a little bit. The Hornets further reduced the deficit as the Celtics got out of rhythm with Pritchard chasing his career high in points. Nick Smith Jr. found a little groove and scored nine quick points for the Hornets, who trailed by 18 heading into the fourth.

The fourth quarter started with a 17-2 Celtics run, and everything after that was pure garbage time. Nothing of note happened there that’s worth recapping.

The Good

Tre Mann had a good offensive game. He was arguably the Hornets best player to play the whole game, and he did decently well for himself with the opportunity. He created a couple of nice shots for himself and hit some threes off the dribble.

Nick Smith Jr. did well with his minutes, which has been the case for a lot of the year. He was aggressive hunting his shot and got some decent looks for himself. He finished with 15 points, which is tied for the second highest output of his career.

The Bad

The Hornets didn’t really want to win this game from a draft lottery positioning perspective, but it was still pretty demoralizing to see how much better the Celtics are than the Hornets top to bottom.

The Hornets were relegated to splitting all of their center minutes between Marques Bolden and JT Thor, so they were inevitably going to struggle inside. They did maybe more than you’d expect even under those circumstances. The Celtics outscored the Hornets 60-26 in the paint, and a lot of those 60 points were lightly contested at best. The backups being so badly bludgeoned inside by the Celtics backups is somewhat emblematic of the problems the Hornets have had all season with their cohesion on both sides of the ball. The defense isn’t connected enough to help without giving him easy looks inside, and the offense doesn’t move fast enough to get good looks at the basket on a regular basis.

On that note, the Celtics tracked down 16 rebounds while the Hornets only managed 29 defensive rebounds. That’s really really bad.

The Hornets shot 28 shots classified as midrange by cleaning the glass. That’s too many, especially if you’re only going to make seven of them.

What’s Next

The Hornets have one game to go. They play their season finale on Sunday at 1:00 in the afternoon along with the rest of the Eastern Conference.