The Hornets are the NBA’s quiet catastrophe

It’s better to be respectable in insignificance than ambitious in suffering. At least that’s been the guiding principle behind the Charlotte Hornets.

No team will ever say that they’re content with mediocrity, but the Hornets have made that confession with their actions over the past few years.

The current Charlotte franchise, with eight losing records in its first nine seasons, were a league-wide afterthought – the Buffalo Bills without the soul that comes from crushing defeats. For defeats to hurt they have to matter, and the Bobcats never played in games that mattered.

Then Al Jefferson came along, and the laughing stopped. The Bobcats made the playoffs, and two years later, this time as the Hornets, they made it back. Last season – 48 wins and an opening-round loss to the Heat – represented the franchise’s most successful season. But following that high water mark, the Hornets have gone right to hell.

Like Portland, Charlotte spent last off-season reserving its spot in long-term NBA purgatory. $174 million for Nicolas Batum and Marvin Williams was the down payment.

When your life is a desert of bad times, a small oasis of ‘not being a joke’ is invigorating. And the Hornets were better than merely serious last season – they had a top nine offence and defence, one of only three teams in the league to pull off that feat.

They made an art form out of ‘not doing dumb things’ and prospered with their focus and attention to detail. They never turned the ball over (fewest turnovers in the league) or fouled (third fewest), and they hit the defensive glass (best in the league) and their free throws (fourth by percentage).

What they lacked in elite individual talent they compensated for with depth, with 12 players averaging over 18 minutes per game, a rare well of competence.

But supreme competence is where Charlotte topped out, with a clearly defined ceiling several storeys short of contention. They were unlucky with injuries in the playoffs and may have beaten Miami with better luck, and they may have even beaten the rock-fight Raptors in the second round, whose stars were undergoing existential, brick crises. But then they would have come up against Cleveland. Competence and focus are nice, but as a weapon they’re a blueberry muffin against the dragon flames of LeBron James and Kyrie Irving.

A fortuitous run to Round 3 followed by an emphatic, no-hope destruction was always the best case for the Hornets.

And in the off-season, they said they were just fine with that.

The peripherals haven’t slipped as much as their record would suggest – the Hornets are still 10th in defence and 16th in offence – but Charlotte are one of the league’s biggest disasters, even if no one is paying attention.

They’re 24-31, just three games ahead of the Sixers. They’ve lost 10 of 11, with the lone win being against the Nets, who are not an NBA team.

Everything has fallen apart. The Hornets are 0-7 in games decided by three points or less and 0-3 in overtime. For much of the year, at the end of games Charlotte struggled to manufacture offence, leaning heavily on Kemba Walker to create from nothing. Now, those struggles have infected entire games.

You watch the Hornets on offence and everything looks professional – the off-ball movement, the screening, the cutting, the sharing – but then you realise there’s just nothing there. Walker is forced to do everything, and after his scorching start to the season he’s settled back into his poor man’s Kyle Lowry reality.

Walker is fine, a top 30 player in the league who plays with toughness, armed with an array of clever drives and savvy step-backs, but he’s closer to being the third best player on a contender than the first.

Batum’s stats are similar to last year, but his passivity is still infuriating. Someone with his talent shouldn’t drift out of games so easily. Why does he take only 12 shots a game? And why does he make only five of them?

Everything else on the roster ranges from uninspiring to untenable. The vague bleakness becomes piercing tragedy whenever Charlotte’s announcers convince themselves they’re excited about Brian Roberts’ passing ability.

The Hornets are where they are – a team that wanted to be at the upper end of mediocrity, now finding themselves at its lower end – because of a lack of ambition, and at times, a lack of common sense.

The Celtics offered Charlotte a bounty for the right to move up in the 2015 draft to select Justise Winslow, supposedly as many as four first round picks, and the Hornets turned them down to select Frank Kaminsky, who isn’t very good (in a meaningful sense), and never appeared like he was going to be very good.

The next year Charlotte was far less protective of its first round pick, kissing pick 22 away to Sacramento for Marco Belinelli, 2016’s answer to the Bucks giving up a first round pick for Greivis Vasquez, another player worth somewhere around pick 45. A trade that makes Sacramento look like a genius is the NBA’s darkest impossibility, but the Hornets got there.

The recent trade of Roy Hibbert and Spencer Hawes for Miles Plumlee and the four years and $50 million on his contract was similarly incomprehensible. Although it did underline the strangest random reality of recent NBA history: two teams were fine paying Miles Plumlee $50 million.

The Hornets’ history is littered with incompetence, from the owner to the front office and down. The quiet catastrophe of their present, and of their impending future, has been obscured by the professionalism they display on the court. Steve Clifford is one of the game’s best coaches, and he gets more out of his players than their talent suggests he should be able to. But this is a team stuck between several nothings, with no discernible plan.

The Hornets have been burned in the draft before, perhaps making them averse to tanking. The two years where they did tank, and tank painfully, clinching the worst record of all time in 2011-12 and winning just 21 games the following year, they were rewarded with Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Cody Zeller.

C.J. McCollum, Steven Adams, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Bradley Beal, Damian Lillard and Andre Drummond are some of the names they passed over in those two drafts.

As a result of failing to capitalise on their failures, the Hornets were left dazed, and the moment they got their bearings again they committed themselves to going down that road, because at least it was a road.

The 76ers, who beat the Hornets in Charlotte without Joel Embiid on Monday, have had a GPS guiding their rebuild, even if the route was dreadfully slow, contentious and at times despicable. But, if Monday night is any indication, a long hard road to somewhere is much more desirable than a slightly less hard road to nowhere.