Preview: Hornets back in action against the Jazz.
We’ve spent most of the season counting down how many more games we had to tolerate before the sweet release of the off-season came to save us. Then the trade deadline happened, and now the Hornets are fun again. They’re riding a three game winning streak with half of the rotation filled with players that weren’t on the team two weeks ago.
Last time out, the Hornets walloped the Hawks 122-99. It was their largest win since they beat the Bucks 138-109 on January 6th, 2023. They hadn’t had a win so big since Mark Williams was backing up Mason Plumlee. How far we’ve come.
Meanwhile the Jazz have not been riding so high. They’re just 4-10 since a six game winning streak raised them over .500 and into the Western Conference playoff picture. Yes, one of those wins was against the Hornets, to be fair. They’ve been scoring a lot of points during the rough patch, but they haven’t been able to stop anyone. They have a 126.3 defensive rating over this 14 game downturn, which is the worst in the league by a significant margin. They seemed to sense that this season wasn’t going to amount to anything in earnest, so they sent off Ochai Agbaji, Kelly Olynyk, and Simone Fontecchio at the trade deadline. All of them were playing significant rotation minutes, and the Jazz didn’t bring back anyone to replace them.
They’ve gone the opposite route of the Hornets–they’ve gone younger and less experienced in their rotation and are losing games because of it.
The two teams are going in opposite directions, and it’s a decent chance for a confident Hornets team to swipe an upset out west, which is not something they often do. They have to be careful about time zones and altitude, as Doc Rivers will tell you that’s all the reason you need to lose to the Jazz.
