LaMelo Ball won the matchup of the Ball brothers, and this time his Charlotte Hornets were able to beat Lonzo’s Chicago Bulls, 125-123.
The Summary
The Hornets got out to a strong start with their starters despite a really rough first stint from LaMelo Ball. In a rather surprising turn of events, it got even better when the bench filtered in. They scored 21 first quarter points, led by Seth Curry’s 11. The Hornets as a team put 36 points on the board to lead by seven after one.
The second quarter was wild. Both teams played fast and both teams made a lot of shots. Nick Smith Jr, who was a starter for the first time in his career, hit a couple of threes and a floater over Nikola Vucevic to lead the Hornets. The offense started to peter out as the end of the half drew near. The Bulls did not have such issues. They went on a 17-4 run to take the lead. The teams traded that lead a couple of times before the half ended with the Hornets up two.
The Hornets briefly built on their lead to open the second half, but they had to withstand an inevitable hot shooting spurt from Zach LaVine. That combined with a third quarter ice age let the Bulls take a lead that they held through the end of the third quarter.
The Hornets blitzed the Bulls to open the fourth quarter. They scored the first 14 points of the quarter with six of those coming from Mark Williams playing volleyball at the rim. The run extended to 17-2 and it looked like the Hornets had a comfortable fourth quarter ahead of them, but they choked in a major way. Nikola Vucevic got going while the Hornets started shooting themselves in the foot. Cody Martin airballed a wide open three and smoked a layup. Josh Green mishandled a pass. LaMelo Ball had his dribble poked away. The offense went bad just like it did at the end of the Suns game. The Bulls used a 14-2 run to cancel out the 17-2 run the Hornets started the quarter with to set up a nailbiter finish.
Mark Williams got called for his fifth foul reaching on LaVine in the final minute, but the Hornets successfully challenged the call to set up a jump ball. The Hornets won the jumpball, but they couldn’t hit a dagger. Vucevic hit a pair of free throws and Vasa Micic could only make one on the other end to set up a possession with the Bulls down by two and 12 seconds left. Vucevic and LaVine missed jumpers, and the Bulls couldn’t get a good look off an offensive rebounds.
The Good
Nick Smith Jr. has been a revelation. He’s quickly become a guy who I expect to make just about any 3-pointer he puts up. He scored 15 points in his first career start and is shooting over 40% from three since becoming a regular rotation player a couple of weeks ago. He looks much more under control than he did last season and is finding a niche as a microwave shooter.
LaMelo couldn’t find his range from deep, but he scored really well inside the arc. He made a handful of acrobatic finishes with a lot of contact in traffic and did a good job of using change of pace and his ball handling to draw fouls. He got to the line 13 times, which made up for his rough 3-point shooting night.
It wasn’t the dominant performance he’s had in the two previous games, but Mark Williams had another solid showing outside of getting cooked by Nikola Vucevic in the second half.
Seth Curry seems to take a few games to charge, then he gets reinserted into the lineup and lights up the opponent in the early goings of games. I look forward to his next round of DNP-CDs before he scores like 12 points in the first quarter of a game next week
The Bad
As I alluded to above, Mark Williams struggled to handle Nikola Vucevic. In some respects, there’s only so much you can do. The Montenegrin is very large, and he excels at using his body to create space to flip in little jump hooks. If the jump hooks are going in, it’s hard to really do anything about it, but I do think there were times where Mark could have held his ground a little bit better to make the shots a little bit farther from the basket.
I’ve kind of avoided putting him here for a while, but Tidjane Salaün has been a real rough watch lately. He did make a three tonight, which improves him to 2-of-14 from deep and 7-of-24 from the field in the month of January. He’s still giving off baby deer vibes, and his ball handling needs to improve drastically for him to become less of a liability with the ball in his hands. Other rookies have had equally slow starts out of the gate; we just saw Cody Williams with the Jazz who’s had a worse statistical season than Salaün. This isn’t an indictment on his long term potential, but it would be nice to see the rookie show a few more flashes going forward.
What’s Next
The Hornets are up to 10 wins on the season! They get the weekend off to celebrate before a noon tipoff against the Mavs on MLK Day.
