The NBA playoffs look out of reach for the Charlotte Hornets.

Standing 5-6 since the All-Star break, Charlotte (29-38, 11th in the Eastern Conference) has improved, but struggled to play consistent quality basketball since the calendar turned.

“I have to do a better job of getting them to understand what they have to do,” coach Steve Clifford said.  “We do it at times. Look at our guys play. We have a lot of good things. We’re smart. We’re unselfish. We have a lot of good skill level. We’re not physically intimidating. We don’t have great toughness. We’re a finesse team.

What I’ve told them from day one is if we’re not willing to admit that, change it and play with physicality, then it’s going to be hard to win, and it has been. You can’t just get beaten up every night on every loose ball, every rebound and then not respond. It’s been the story too many times this year.”

In Monday’s 115-109 loss to Chicago, Charlotte’s perimeter problems became apparent.

“It’s not going to get any easier, and it shouldn’t,” said forward Marvin Williams, who had 13 points, 18 rebounds and five assists. “We put ourselves in this position.”

Said Clifford: “The coach’s job is to get the team to understand what they have to do, and to get them to buy into doing it. So I’m not blaming them. That’s my job. Everybody talks about connecting. I’m supposed to be good at connecting. Well, I haven’t connected with this team, because I know what the problems are. They know what the problems are, and yet the problems have not been fixed.”

Clifford noted the need for guard Nic Batum to aggressively drive to the basket prior to his missing the Chicago game with a migraine. Without Batum, the Hornets lacked pace and poise, but Clifford insisted the team’s inability to finish against Chicago did not stem from his absence, but from players not getting back on defense.

“It’s got nothing to do with facilitation,” Clifford said. “It’s not the offense. We had 109 tonight against a good defensive team. It had nothing to do with Nic’s [absence]. We didn’t guard them at all. It was just mistakes. It’s undisciplined defense.”

Said guard Kemba Walker, who scored 21 points and 10 assists: “We’ve just been making too many mistakes as a whole. A lot of gameplan stuff where we’re just not executing our game plan stuff. Usually, when we’re good, we do what we have to do defensively and take advantage of our game plan, but we haven’t been doing that, especially for a full 48 minutes, so that has been hurting us.”

Four games out of eighth place in the East and with Chicago holding the tiebreaker, Charlotte’s season could end prematurely if they do not trackback on defense consistently in the remaining 15 games.

“There’s a big difference between tuning a coach out and not buying totally into what he’s saying,” Clifford said. “One thing we’ve done here for three years is we’ve played hard, we’ve been hard to play against and we’ve never beat ourselves. That’s not our team this year. We’re not the most hard to play against and we do beat ourselves.”
 

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