The Hornets are winning with defense?

The Hornets are winning with defense -- sort of

On December 5th, 2025, Brandon Miller rejoined the Hornets for good (knock on your desk, my head, whatever wooden thing you have in reach), joining an also recently-returned-to-health LaMelo Ball (run to the kitchen and rap your knuckles on a cutting board) to give the Charlotte Hornets their full complement of stars for the first time in ages.

Since then, the offense, predictably, has sung — second in the NBA since that date. Guard-guard screens (sometimes even guard-guard-guard double-drag actions), incendiary three-point shooting, lots of on-ball creation between Ball, Miller, and resplendent rookie Kon Knueppel giving perimeter defenders absolutely nowhere to hide while center Moussa Diabate scratches for offensive rebounds and the execrable Miles Bridges scavenges for whatever shots he can find. There’s a lot going on, in a good way.

But basketball is a two-way sport, and it’s the defense that really caught my eye. On paper, Charlotte is not exactly weighed down with a load of straitjacket artists, yet in that same stretch, the Hornets have ranked eighth in defense. They’ve gone 21-15 since Miller’s return, a surprising success that could’ve been even better if they could string together stronger clutch performances. How are they doing it?

It starts schematically. Coach Charles Lee has instituted a few rules for his team that they rarely breach. One: no right angles. Charlotte leads the league in fewest corner threes allowed, and even in their worst days under Lee (read: the immediately preceding seasons), it’s been a clear focus.

Two: no second chances. The Hornets have the best defensive rebounding rate in the Association. They take gang rebounding to a whole new level, as Bridges is their best individual defensive rebounder with just 5.1 DRPG. 27 other teams have at least one player averaging more per game, and many have multiple.

The Hornets have size at nearly every spot on the floor, particularly on the perimeter. Every rotation player averaging at least 20 minutes per game is an above-median positional boarder except backup big man Ryan Kalkbrenner, who often does the dirty box-out work so guys like Ball and Knueppel can grab-and-go (rebounding is Ball’s most underrated skill).

I can’t prove it, and I have no idea if this is a coaching point of emphasis or just natural instinct, but I swear the Hornets lead the league in controlled tip-outs to teammates:

In a league that hasn’t valued the possession game this much in decades, the ability to own the glass on both sides (they’re also a top-five offensive rebounding team) is a major competitive advantage.

Lee has also brought over an emphasis shared by former bosses Mike Budenholzer and Joe Mazzulla on avoiding fouls. Even at their nadir over the last few seasons, the Hornets have generally played clean defense. They have a top-10 free-throw-avoidance rate during this stretch and top-five for the season (at the expense of turnovers: the Hornets virtually never force opponents into giveaways, largely preferring sound positioning and help to gambling for steals and risking putting the defense into rotation).

Lee loves to talk about the MIG, or “Most Important Guy,” on defense. In his view, that’s the on-ball defender charged with containing his man without fouling. When executed properly, he gets rather excited. Watch Lee’s reaction here, as Diabate switches out onto the perimeter and stonewalls Mikal Bridges during a preseason game:

Who couldn’t love a coach like that?

It helps that the Hornets have a flexible group. We’ll talk about Ball’s defense later, but he’s at least the height of a small forward, if not the weight. Knueppel is relatively short-armed but barrel-chested; same with fellow rookie Blue Devil Sion James and reserve forward Grant Williams. Miller and backup wing Josh Green have nearly seven-foot wingspans. They and the lanky Bridges will switch on-ball plenty — and, in Ball’s case, the team will do a whole lot of off-ball pre-switching to try and keep him out of the action.

In general, the communication has been markedly better this year across the board. Watch this excellent defensive possession against the Spurs:

The first thing we see is Diabate (#14) switch onto Spurs guard Steph Castle while Josh Green (#10) battles Wemby for position. GIFs don’t include audio, but in the broadcast, you can hear Grant Williams (#2) yelling at Green to scram-switch so that the bigger Williams can take Wemby. Brandon Miller (#24) sags off non-shooter Dylan Harper, and together with Williams, prevents the entry pass to Wembanyama.

While that’s happening, Ball is already talking with Green to make sure that Green takes big man Luke Kornet, who is about to set the screen for the ball-handling Castle (which leaves Ball to guard the corner shooter, safely out of the action).

As Castle runs the pick-and-roll, Diabate heroically breaks up the lob attempt. Despite the Hornets’ uncharacteristic failure to secure the rebound, Diabate maintains his balance and runs out on Julian Champagnie, preventing the three-point attempt. With Charlotte players rushing around to find their mark, Champagnie tries to rush a pass, but Ball has picked himself up off the floor and located the still-dangerous Kornet under the rim. He easily intercepts, forcing a 24-second violation.

That’s a lot of talking and activity! Normal coaches dream of possessions like this; Coach Lee must’ve needed medical deflating.

If I were to pick the team’s defensive strength outside of rebounding, it may be attention to off-ball detail (particularly relative to past performance). Fred Katz at the Athletic recently wrote a bit about the Hornets’ “swarming” defense, and you see it in action every game. I hate to rely upon platitudes, but there’s no quit. Another example: Knueppel, in particular, has excelled at chasing guys around screens, an often-thankless task. Even when he does get chipped, the recovery motor catches players off guard:

Ball has dramatically improved, although that’s faint praise. He’s been benched by Coach Lee a few times in the past few seasons for inattention to detail, and the storyteller looking for causal relationships in me would love to say that the tough love has had an impact.

The worst driver in Charlotte is still too far upright while guarding the ball. Other teams have figured out going through Ball is easier than going around him. But now that the games matter, his bored-student attentiveness has tightened up, and he’s far more likely to help and recover with multiple efforts.

Of course, more likely certainly doesn’t mean always. Ball remains a well-below-average defender overall, one whose cardinal sin is getting caught in no man’s land while “helping”:

But going from catastrophic to below-average is still helpful! EPM rates Ball’s defensive impact in the 36th percentile, and D-DPM puts it in the 31st percentile. Of course, you’d like more, but that’s still a big tick up over his recent injury-riddled seasons.

Miller’s improvement is much easier to see, and he deserves a big share of the credit for Charlotte’s defensive turnaround. EPM pegged him as one of the worst defenders in the league as a rookie two seasons ago (something that never really matched the eye test, to be fair), but he’s well above the median now. While the rookie James is the team’s best individual defender, when he’s on the bench, Miller typically gets the big dog assignment. His top matchups are a diverse list of ballhandlers like Jalen Johnson, Darius Garland, and Kevin Durant. That famous wingspan allows him to get a finger on balls that shooters had assumed were safe, particularly on chasedown blocks:

Miller’s improvement as an on-ball guardsman without compromising his offensive production has been a huge part of Charlotte’s two-way success. He’s probably a little bit overtaxed as the number-one stopper, at least until he develops more strength (bigger forwards like Cooper Flagg plow right through him without trouble), but someone in the starting group has to be a point-of-attack defender. It’s encouraging that Miller has been capable enough in that position.

I do love Miller’s competitive attitude, and that’s something that flows down through the rest of the team. He’s not afraid to hold teammates accountable. Then again, with try-hards like Knueppel, James, Williams, Green, and Diabate running alongside him, effort is rarely the issue.

Still, despite the team’s impressive numbers, there are reasons to think the defense will come back to Earth. For one thing, the team has been remarkably healthy of late. Basketball gods know the Hornets deserve some fortunate injury luck for once, but it’s still worth noting that, with injuries up leaguewide, the sheer amount of uprightness they have in their rotation is helpful.

For another, there is a dose of shooting luck involved in their recent stretch. Since December 5th, opponents have hit just 34.7% from deep against them, the fourth-stingiest mark in the league, and they’ve been similarly poor from midrange. (Synergy says that opposing forces have hit just 38% on unguarded threes for the season, another low number.)

For what it’s worth, the league average is 36.1% on three-balls allowed during this timeframe. If the Hornets’ defense sported that number, their rating would rise roughly a half-point per 100 possessions, dropping them from 8th to 11th. That’s still pretty good!

I’m not sure the Hornets’ defense is playoff proof. They haven’t faced a murderer’s row of offenses, although they’ve mostly stymied the good ones they have faced. And even a focused Ball presents too alluring a target, to say nothing of Bridges’ disastrous defense at the four spot (he is the Hornets’ worst defender by virtually every metric, from EPM to D-DPM to on/off splits).

But Miller is quite good and improving, Knueppel can hold his own, and Diabate is a solid anchor in the middle. A fleet of defensive-minded wings and forwards provides some defensive oomph off the bench. It’s not hard to picture the Hornets upgrading at power forward over the offseason — the shooting from Ball/Miller/Knueppel means they aren’t as reliant upon finding an offensively-focused stretch-four as most teams — and eking closer toward a luckproof elite defense.

We know that a healthy Hornets team will put up points, and that should only improve with time and chemistry. Defense has always been the question mark. Charlotte has not had a top-15 defense in a decade. Now, a strong closing push could get them there for the year.

How the team plays in the postseason (if they make it; despite their hot stretch, they’re still just 10th in the East and closer to 11th than eighth) is almost beside the point. There’s a proof of concept here that the team has been searching for since 2021-22, when Ball’s ascendance during his second season (his lone All-Star campaign) led Charlotte to the play-in, and everything seemed on the up in Queen City.

The injury-riddled fallout from that year is a reminder that things can change in a heartbeat, but Hornets fans are familiar with heartbreak. It’s far more enjoyable to look at one of the league’s most promising young backcourts and imagine. With some luck and some middling roster upgrades, the Charlotte Hornets could enter next season as a threat to post a top-10 offense and a top-10 defense.

Dare to dream.