For the last few years, The Athletic has conducted an anonymous poll of players around the league towards the end of the season. This season, they got survey results from 158 players with at least one respondent from each team. The questions ranged from MVP votes to opinions about the state of the game to who’s over and underrated. The Charlotte Hornets made a few appearances, and none of them were good.

After a couple of positive talking points, the article gets to the juicy questions. The first, “who’s the most overrated player in the league?” The leading vote getter was Tyrese Haliburton, which tickled me a bit. I thought Haliburton got prematurely anointed last season and doesn’t get enough credit for being an abysmal defender. A good chunk of NBA players seem to agree. There was one Hornet that got a single vote–LaMelo Ball. On the surface, his name appearing in the ‘most overrated’ votes seems bad until you see the rest of the names. Aside from a stray vote for Jock Landale, just about every player that got a vote for most overrated is some level of very good player.

Now for the real good (bad stuff).

Players were asked which is the best organization in the league. The Hornets received zero votes. They were also asked which is the worst, and the Hornets received 38% of the votes, nearly double the next team. No justification was given for the votes here, but based on the voting, it was pretty closely tied to winning. The Hornets have the longest active playoff drought, so naturally they’re going to be perceived poorly around the league. Fellow cellar dwellers in the Wizards and Pelicans were the next highest vote getters.

The Hornets are clearly working to change the perception of their organization with the new practice facility, renovations to the arena, and front office overhaul since the new ownership group took over in the summer of 2023. If the Hornets start winning, their perception will change.

Further down, the players were asked who the best and worst coaches were. Charles Lee didn’t receive any votes for best coach, but he did receive six votes for the worst coach. Brian Keefe (24.7%), Mike Budenholzer, and Doc Rivers were worse. A first year coach of a losing team is never going to get votes for the best coach. Again, we’ll see if wins change the perception.

There are a few other questions about analytics and gambling and stuff, but nothing that’s pertinent to the Hornets. Moral of the story is that when you’re a long time loser, you develop a reputation as a loser. Crazy how that works. The Hornets have an uphill battle to climb to scrub that reputation. They have some good pieces and things are heading in the right direction. We’ll check back next year and see if anything changes.