The Charlotte Hornets are puke. By win percentage they are one of the three or four worst teams in basketball, but unlike their fellow losers, the Hornets sincerely believe they have some significant part of their core of the future already in place, which is sad enough that if I think about it for very long I will cry. The Chicago Bulls aren't quite puke, but they'd be better off if they were. Instead, they are the very textbook case of NBA mediocrity, a dreary irrelevant also-ran made up of mismatched bozos hoping to play their ways individually into trades to anyplace else, except Charlotte. The six-win Washington Wizards are currently 3–1 against these two bumbling outfits; it's a real dog-food buffet down in the lower half of the Eastern Conference.
Both teams shoot a lot of three-pointers. My abacus tells me there are worse ways to lose a basketball game, but there are not many that are uglier. The Bulls have had a better time with bombing away: Per Cleaning the Glass, they've outperformed their expected record by about two wins, a taste of good fortune which accounts entirely for their hold on middling-hood despite being one of the handful of worst defensive teams out there. The Hornets are bad at shooting and even worse at picking their shots—you'd have to watch a couple of their games to appreciate how blindly and recklessly their "best" players chuck crap only vaguely basketward—and as a consequence they have the third worst offense by points per possession in the NBA.
Where the Boston Celtics—grim and actuarial, but excellent—do lots of clean and crisp stuff to generate an overwhelming barrage of good three-pointers from reliable shooters, the Bulls and Hornets are throwing it up to math the way a lovelorn adolescent assigns their romantic fate to the count of petals on the nearest flower. While it is indeed a make-or-miss league, generally you hope that is not the extent of your team's offensive imagination. The Hornets in particular are just gone off those three-pointers, pure blank-eyed dogmatic surrender. They could try more complicated stuff, but math will not bail them out if intricacy proves beyond the limits of their attention span; simply fire up lots of threes, and sometimes make enough of them to scratch out a victory.
The Bulls and Hornets played for the first time this season back on Dec. 13. It was awful. An abomination! Chicago attempted 51 three-pointers and made 14 of them, the anchor of an attack that posted an offensive rating that night of 103.8, more than a full point worse than the worst offense in the league. The Hornets, who are unimaginably terrible to watch, did worse: eight makes in 46 attempts, and an offensive rating of 90.5. The unfortunate fans who paid to attend this performance were treated to a combined 75 missed three-pointers. The Bulls shot 39.8 percent from the floor and 27.5 percent from the arc and won in regulation by 14 points, when what they deserved was to be shoved into the back of a garbage truck and then pulverized by the compactor.
The teams got together again on Dec. 30. This time the Bulls attempted 55 three-pointers in regulation, and made 15 of them. The Hornets attempted 40, and made just 10, but the last of these, a lunging desperation heave off the fingertips of Miles Bridges, rattled home inside the final two seconds of the fourth quarter, sending the game to overtime and excitable Hornets play-by-play man Eric Collins into ear-splitting hysterics.
The Bulls did enough in overtime to win by seven points, becoming one of the few teams in NBA history to win a game while missing 42 three-pointers. Basketball Reference tells me that there have been 19 games ever where both teams shot 30 percent or worse on 40 or more three-point attempts, and the Hornets and Bulls have now played two of them in just over two weeks. The poor suffering fools who witnessed these games unfolding their putrid horrors in real time saw the Bulls and Hornets combine to make 50 total three-pointers and to miss 150 of them.
Every style of basketball from every era has its worst versions—I was a Bullets fan back when their idea of approximating the winning style of the day involved dumping the ball in the post to Gheorghe Muresan—but at other points in the history of hoops teams were still looking for shots that were comparatively likely to go into the basket. Whatever the math has to say about it, generally speaking it is better to watch basketball when the ball goes in the hoop somewhere close to half the time. If that can't be arranged, then surely variety is the next best thing. Possibly this is a boomer take, but there is something particularly hateful about watching two lousy teams attempt and fail to pepper each other with long-range blind-fire. Whatever the case, I would rather have a rodent poop onto my eyeballs than watch these two teams get together for another of these!
The Bulls and Hornets are scheduled to play for a third time on Jan. 17. They say the odds of an asteroid colliding with the arena at the moment of the opening tip are low, but how much lower can they be than the odds of Miles Bridges making a three-pointer?
