They couldn’t blame their sluggishness on travel issues, given they arrived nearly some 16 hours prior to the opening toss, and didn’t deal with some of the troubles many others experienced courtesy of a snowstorm gripping the nation’s capital.
Yet once again, a molasses-like start that was masked by a double-digit second-half edge significantly contributed to the Charlotte Hornets’ 124-121 loss to Washington on Monday night. Numbed by a frustrating tendency that has them playing as if they are hitting the snooze button at tipoff time, they were powerless to explain the unpleasant nature of their first-quarter struggles.
“I wish I had an answer,” said Gordon Hayward, who led them with 27 points. “We’ve got to be better off to start. Even with the way we started, we battled. It was a great effort. We ran out of gas there at the end, but certainly if we started better that would have helped. We built a sizable lead there and just couldn’t hold it down.”
The trouble with all this is the Hornets (19-19) can’t keep making things quite so difficult on themselves and expect to be as fortunate as they were against the Wizards to even climb back into it. Anyone who’s ever watched an NBA game understands it’s usually bursting with peaks and valleys for each team and the outcome isn’t necessarily decided in the first quarter. Or even the second.
But what those collective failures do in the Hornets’ case is it forces them to continuously expend energy while finding different ways to make amends for their poor opening quarters. They often need herculean efforts to reverse the alarming trend.
Case in point against the Wizards (19-18) when Terry Rozier accounted for 60.9% of the Hornets’ fourth-quarter points through the initial 10:07. Then there are those games like they’ve had against Phoenix when they were mashed early and never recovered, standing wobbly the entire night.
“We’ve just got to come out more aggressive,” said Miles Bridges, who had 23 points, 14 rebounds and three assists in his second game since clearing the league’s health and safety protocols. “I think we are just thinking too much. We’ve just got to come out and play basketball. That’s all it is.”
Correcting the problem has been a thorny issue. They’ve been outscored on 21 occasions in the first quarter this season and dropped to 9-12 in those games, losing seven straight.
These repeated, lethargic opening efforts are the first salvo in a chain reaction of exhaustive events. It exacerbates the last-second misses. Highlights any end-of-game defensive lapses. Allows somebody else on the opposing team to put on a cape and turn in their own superhero effort.
Similar to what Kyle Kuzma did with his 14-point explosion in the final 12 minutes, then following it up by mentioning on the NBC Sports Washington postgame show how the Hornets are not particularly good on defense.
Kuzma, a good friend of Bridges’ who hails also from their hometown of Flint, Mich., told it like it is.
“Reality check, you know?“ Bridges said when Kuzma’s thoughts were relayed to him. “Every team struggles with something, so we are just getting better. As long as we are getting better we are doing great. So we’ve just got to get better at defense.”
Gaining more consistency in that area from the starters is a must. Rozier and LaMelo Ball pointed to their increased want-to in the backcourt as a reason they were riding a three-game winning streak preceding this two-game skid. That hasn’t quite been there lately, but it’s not completely on them. More is also required from Mason Plumlee and Hayward.
Washington kept knifing into the paint as if the Hornets willingly left the front door wide-open for a burglar to enter and rob them of all their jewels.
“First group came out, I think the first five minutes of the game we gave up 19 points,” coach James Borrego said. “It starts there. That group has to get out to better starts defensively. You can’t give up 19 points to start the game in the first five minutes. We put ourselves in a hole and we dug it out. The next group came in and dug it out. But that’s not a formula for success and we’ve got to be better to start games.”
When they don’t, the result is their most recent bothersome outing, one that could fall into the dreaded box of losses you typically look back on in the final days during the standings watch, wishing the final result was different. By failing to close out the Wizards and stepping on their necks when they had their chance, it provides their Southeast Division foe with a glimmer of hope.
If they held on, they could have wrapped up the season series, which is an all-important tiebreaker when unraveling playoff positioning scenarios. Instead, it will be another note-jotting session and the final thing that should be scribbled on it is 8-5 — Charlotte’s record when it outscores opponents in the opening quarter.
“It’s disappointing tonight,” Borrego said. “We should have won this game, we could have won this game. But we just didn’t make it happen. We didn’t close out this game like we could have or should have.
“Yeah, this was a missed opportunity.”
