Last night at Spectrum Center, on a Saturday night in late March, your Charlotte Hornets rolled over the Memphis Grizzlies, 124 to 101, and made it three wins in a row like they'd been doing this all year.
LaMelo Ball hit seven threes. Seven. He finished with 29 points, wore a look on his face that said he wasn't surprised, and left the building at 37-34 with something the Queen City hasn't seen in a long time: a Charlotte Hornets team that matters in March.
Folks, let me ask you something. Do you remember where this team was on January 21st?
Sixteen wins and twenty-eight losses. Twelve games under .500. Staring down the barrel of another lottery pick, another summer of promises, another season that started with hope and dissolved into arithmetic. The Hornets had been to the playoffs once in the last ten years. Once. I've been covering Charlotte sports since before LaMelo Ball was in middle school and I'm telling you: there were nights this winter when the crowd at Spectrum Center sounded like a library with better lighting.
Then something happened.
Charles Lee happened. The players he'd been developing all year finally started playing like the team he built. Moussa Diabate — a man who was waived by the Los Angeles Clippers last summer — put up 11 points and 14 rebounds last night in a starting lineup that has the best point differential of any five-man unit in the NBA this season. The Clippers didn't want him. He is now the starting center on the best lineup in basketball. (If you've ever been passed over for something you deserved, this one's for you.)
Kon Knueppel — the first-year kid from Duke who was mostly supposed to be a nice complementary piece — broke the all-time NBA record for three-pointers made by a rookie earlier this season. In 59 games. Keegan Murray held the old mark at 206 made in 80 games. Knueppel needed 59. He's not breaking the record. He BURIED it.
And then there's Brandon Miller, who turns 23 years old today, quietly becoming one of the best young forwards in the Eastern Conference. Last night: 22 points. Friday in Orlando: 25 points, five threes, and eight assists. In 28 minutes. He doesn't say much. He doesn't have to.
This is the part where I have to look LaMelo Ball square in the eye, because any honest column about your Hornets has to answer that question.
He is one of the most gifted passers this league has produced in the last thirty years. I say it having watched a lot of basketball in a lot of cities, and the things LaMelo does — the way he sees angles that aren't there yet, threads passes through traffic that closes before the ball arrives — I've seen maybe two or three players at that level in my lifetime. He has also missed more games than he's played in two of his five seasons. He got into a two-car crash in Charlotte in February and was back at practice the next morning. He collided with his own head coach on the sideline hard enough to need medical attention and came back to score 24 points that same night.
The kid is durable in all the wrong ways and the right ways at the same time.
This year — when he's been healthy and the pieces around him are in place — he is what Charlotte always hoped he'd become. Two Tuesdays ago against Miami, he put up 30 points and 13 assists. A Tuesday night, regular season, in a game nobody outside the Eastern Conference standings table was paying attention to. That's who this man is right now.
And here's the thing — they did all of this without a summer blockbuster trade, without a superteam assembly, without anyone outside this building telling them they could. Nine wins in a row at one point, a franchise-record eight-game road winning streak, a climb from 16-28 to 37-34. The last time this franchise played relevant basketball in late March was 2016.
Charles Lee is in his FIRST year as a head coach. Anywhere. First year. He won Eastern Conference Coach of the Month in January — only the fourth coach in this franchise's history to do it, which tells you everything about how often Charlotte gives coaches the chance to get that far. Jason Kidd — a man who won a championship and knows what good basketball looks like — has said publicly that Lee belongs in the Coach of the Year conversation.
Look. I grew up in Chicago, where the local TV guys' job was to take a regular Tuesday night at the Stadium and make you feel like the whole city was holding its breath. I have been doing this column, this beat, this city for long enough to know the difference between a team on a hot streak and a team that has figured something out.
This team has figured something out.
The play-in tournament is real. A date with Philadelphia sitting 9th is likely for a Charlotte club at 10th, and whoever wins that game moves on to the real thing — playoff basketball in Charlotte for the first time since 2016. Ten years is a long time to ask anyone to believe.
Last night at Spectrum Center — popcorn, possibility, 37-34, and LaMelo Ball knocking down his seventh three-pointer like it was the most natural thing in the world — the scoreboard showed 124 to 101 and the building sounded like Charlotte finally remembered how this is supposed to feel.
Folks, believe it. Your Hornets are back. And this time, nobody saw them coming.
(Also this morning: your Charlotte Checkers just clinched their seventh consecutive playoff spot. That story is here. Charlotte is having a Sunday.)