The Hornets got punked; do they shrink now or rise to match what Heat did to them?
Most Charlotte Hornets have no idea how a playoff game looks, sounds and feels.
Sunday, they got a preview. For many of the younger guys, it must have felt terrifying.
The Miami Heat punked the Hornets on Sunday, winning 121-111. Miami continuously got the ball to the rim, pestered the Hornets into turnovers and fouls, and so physically dominated that Charlotte players became preoccupied with the referees.
This is how the playoffs — or at least for the Hornets, the play-in tournament — will look. It’s a level few on Charlotte’s roster have experienced, and that was painfully obvious from their overwhelmed appearance Sunday.
“The team that is more physical is always going to have an edge,” said guard Terry Rozier, one of the few Hornets with playoff experience. “Once we got down, their physicality made us argue with the refs.”
Translation: The Heat, which had lost two prior meetings with Charlotte this season, took ownership of the Hornets’ heads. Miami forward Jimmy Butler carved up Charlotte’s defense, finishing with 18 points, eight assists and eight rebounds. Center Bam Adebayo totaled 20 points, 10 assists and seven rebounds.
There were stakes to this game the Hornets haven’t experienced in a couple of seasons. Winning Sunday might have been essential to any realistic chance of Charlotte rising above its current eighth spot in the Eastern Conference standings.
It’s possible the Hornets will play the Heat in the play-in tournament for one of the last two playoff spots in the East. Sunday was a warning of sorts as to how that would be.
Forward Miles Bridges sure understood the message Miami sent.
“This team was in the (NBA) Finals last year — they know what it’s like to be in the playoffs,” Bridges said. “They played more physical than us today, and it showed.”
Look down, not up, in the standings
The Heat pulled into sixth place with this victory. A loss slipped the Boston Celtics to seventh. Since the Celtics have already clinched a tiebreaker over the Hornets, supplanting Boston in the standings seems quite unlikely.
So the Hornets’ legitimate goal with eight regular-season games remaining is holding off the Indiana Pacers and Washington Wizards for eighth place. That’s an important tier in the play-in format: If you’re seventh or eighth, you have two chances to win one game to advance. If you’re ninth or tenth, you must win two games to advance.
The Hornets are promising, particularly with LaMelo Ball and Malik Monk back from injury. However, they are also fragile, and the Heat illustrated how so: Miami got Bridges and P.J. Washington (21 points and six rebounds) into first-half foul trouble. The Hornets are small and not particularly deep in the frontcourt these days. Once Washington committed his fourth foul early in the third quarter, this game felt over.
The other gauge of how Miami manipulated the Hornets was all the turnovers: Fifteen might not sound awful, but a majority of those were live-ball — the ones that lead directly to layups at the other end. The Heat converted 23 points off Hornets turnovers.
The solution is on the roster, but not available
The guy who the Hornets most need right now isn’t available: Small forward Gordon Hayward is out of his walking boot, but his right foot is still sufficiently sprained that he’s done very little on-court work a month after suffering the injury.
Coach James Borrego said Hayward being out of that boot is progress. However, there’s no indication when -- or even if -- Hayward will be back this season.
The Hornets committed $120 million over four years to veteran Hayward for just this purpose -- to calm and organize the young guys when games started having stakes.
Sunday, the stakes were apparent. So was the intimidation.
“This is a great marker for us,” Borrego said. “We’ve got to get to this level physically.”
Mentally and emotionally, too. This isn’t something you learn from others. You only grasp the striking playoff difference by experiencing it first-hand.
This story was originally published May 3, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "The Hornets got punked; do they shrink now or rise to match what Heat did to them?."
