The Charlotte Hornets were bullied and thoroughly outplayed by the Orlando Magic, who sent them home with a blowout loss in the second round of the play-in.

The Summary

It wasn’t an ideal start for the good guys. After the Magic stepped out of bounds on their first possession, they reeled off 10 quick points for an early lead. It part of two separate runs of at least 10 straight points while the Hornets badly struggled with the physicality of the Magic’s defense. The Magic scored 26 points in the paint and led by a whopping 22 points after one quarter. It didn’t get much better in the second. It looked a lot like the games where the Hornets have struggled with the Pistons. The Magic pushed the limits with grabbing and bumping, and the Hornets got called for a lot of fouls trying to break free from it. The Hornets fell all the way down by as much as 35, but the Hornets were able to close on a nice little 4-0 run capped off by a buzzer beating jumper by Moussa Diabate.

The third quarter was better, but that wasn’t exactly a high bar to clear. The Hornets started creating some space and got the offense going a little bit. Unfortunately they weren’t getting the stops they needed to make a significant dent. In a fitting play representative of a lot of the game, Anthony Black pushed LaMelo in the back going for a rebound. Black grabbed the rebound, and LaMelo fell into Grant Williams’s legs. Williams fell down and tripped Black, who made the layup and was given an and-1 opportunity. The Hornets still managed to chip away at the deficit, but the bottom dropped out at the end of the quarter and they found themselves down 31 after three quarters.

The fourth quarter was of no consequence.

The Good

Nothing. I don’t think any player played well and there was nothing about the team performance that was encouraging. There were good things about the season, but that’s for another time. The Hornets did basically nothing well in this game in particular. LaMelo came the closest to having a good game, but the vast majority of his production came in the second half when the game was out of reach.

The Bad

While the officiating was extremely frustrating to deal with, at the end of the day, the Hornets were their own worst enemy. They were sloppy with the ball, even without defensive pressure from the Magic. Brandon Miller had a handful of careless turnovers out top and most everyone else took their turn losing a dribble or misplacing a pass. There was a point pretty far into the game where the Hornets had more turnovers than made field goals.

The Hornets have hung their hat on three things all season–3-point shooting, rebounding, and low-foul defense. They failed at all three of those things. They made just 12-of-45 threes, a fitting conclusion to what had become a growing concern as the season wound down. They were beat up on the boards, letting the Magic gather in over a third of their misses before garbage time, while the Hornets struggled to make an impact on their own offensive glass despite all the misses. And they put the Magic on the line 37 times. You’d think failing at all of your core objectives would lead to a bad outcome, and yeah. That’s what happened.

This is going to be sour grapes, but we’re in cope mode right now, so we’re going to let it fly. The officiating in this game was absolutely brutal. For one, for a neutral observer, the sheer volume of whistles made for such a clunky viewing experience. It also made the game take like 30 minutes longer than a normal NBA game despite an entire quarter of garbage time. And from a Hornets perspective, the way the game was called made a terrible game even worse. The Magic set a tone that they were going to be physical from the jump, and they were allowed to initiate all sorts of contact on the defensive end. Like I said at the beginning of this recap, it looked like some of the Pistons games where the defenders were hanging onto any offensive player that tries to move, and the Hornets were getting called for trying to free themselves up. I lost track of the number of moving screens that were called while defenders were hanging onto shoulders and hips to inhibit the offensive player from getting around the screen. Meanwhile the Magic got rewarded for a bunch of head down drives into traffic. The Magic were initiating all sorts of physicality all game long, and we were constantly reminded of that by Stan Van Gundy in the broadcast. Yet somehow the Hornets were called for 50% more fouls than the Magic in the first half. It evened out in the second, and the Hornets admittedly were given the benefit of some soft whistles in the third quarter, but it was far too little too late to matter to the outcome of the game.

What’s Next

It’s a bitterly disappointing end to what’s been the most fun season of basketball the Charlotte Hornets have given us in a while. On the whole, it was wildly successful, and there’s a lot to look forward to in the future. Now it’s time for Jeff Peterson to tackle a new challenge. We’ve seen him acquire assets and elevate the team to relevance. Now he’ll be tasked with equipping this team to take the next step.