The interruption of the NBA season couldn't have come at a worse time for the Charlotte Hornets.
The Hornets never played better this season than the eight-game span leading up to the league shutting down March 11, in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They beat three playoff teams (at Toronto, home against Houston, at Miami) and put a scare into the Eastern Conference-leading Milwaukee Bucks. They were top-11 in that span, among 30 NBA teams, in both offensive and defensive efficiency.
Beyond the numbers, they just looked different: Not intimidated by teams of greater experience and talent.
"It's frustrating that we can't continue to see that growth and development," Hornets coach James Borrego said Wednesday in a conference call with Charlotte media. "If we do get (the season back), we need to hit the ground running, get back to playing that kind of basketball."
What was different in the two weeks between back-to back wins over New York and Toronto in late February and the 20-point comeback in Miami on March 11?
"We just looked like we could stand toe-to-toe with those teams, athletically and with our length. When I look at those eight games, I say, 'We belong in those games.' It didn't look like we were out-manned, outmatched," Borrego said.
"We were defending, we were moving the ball, we were athletic. We were attacking the rim."
Having said that, Borrego isn't deluding himself; when the season suddenly stopped, the Hornets were 23-42, with the sixth-fewest wins in the East and all but out of the playoff chase. Over the past six weeks, Charlotte's second-year coach scouted his team, collectively and player-by-player. He has also studied potential draft picks and free agents the Hornets might target in the offseason, whenever that starts.
That self-scouting reinforced a huge flaw:
"We need defensive rebounding. Even in that stretch, where we were 10th defensively in the league, we were still very low in our defensive-rebounding percentage. That has to get better. That's an area we will address," Borrego said.
When the season ended, the Hornets were last in the NBA in defensive-rebound ratio. It's hard to get stops, even if you're defending well, if you can't regularly get possession off the other team's misses.
Borrego hit on several topics during a 20-minute interview:
