Charlotte Hornets loss to the Utah Jazz 105-98 Saturday night. It's Charlotte’s seventh straight loss and tenth straight loss on the road. Starting center Cody Zeller missed his sixth straight game due to a quadriceps contusion, Hornets are 1-12 when he doesn’t play this season. Hornets were also without backup point guard Ramon Sessions who has a torn meniscus in his knee. Miles Plumlee played his first game as a Hornet after being traded from the Bucks for Spencer Hawes and Roy Hibbert on Thursday and despite not being able to practice with the team, which at the time was noticeable but overall played fine, scoring four points, and grabbed eight rebounds in 17 minutes of play. Charlotte came out firing to start the game quickly taking a double-digit lead, led by starting center Frank Kaminsky who scored 12 points in the first quarter. But the Jazz did close the second quarter on a 9-2 run to take a 52-44 lead at halftime. But again, the Hornets came out firing to start the second half scoring 38 points in the third quarter and taking a ten-point lead heading into the fourth. Then Utah went on a 21-4 run capped by Johnson three-pointer to give the Jazz a 103-96 lead with 59 seconds left in the game.
The MVP for the Hornets this game would be Marvin Williams who tallied a double-double, 16 points 12 rebounds. Marvin hasn’t been playing well lately and hopefully, this was a picker-upper game for him and hopefully starts playing better. The leading scorers for the Hornets were Kemba Walker with 18 points 6 assists, who was questionable with an illness and didn’t look like his regular self out there. He also passed Gerald Wallace for second in all-time franchise points. Frank Kaminsky scored 15 points while Marco Belinelli added 13 points off the bench. There multiple things that Hornets didn’t do that cost them the win tonight. I’m going to touch on two of them since its late while I’m typing this. The first thing is Charlotte was outrebounded 51-38 in the game and allowed Utah to get 11 offense rebounds. I understand that your starting center is out and the center you just traded for, hasn’t even practiced with the team but you can’t win on the road in the NBA if you allow the home team to outrebound you by that kind of margin. The other thing the Hornets need to work on is their fourth quarter defense, over the past few years, the Hornets were in top ten in the NBA in fourth quarter defense, this year there in the bottom half in that category. When you let, a team go on a 21-4 run in the fourth quarter, that’s hard to overcome. Cause if you do manage to tie it up, all the memento is with the other team in the closing seconds of the game. Utah’s leading scorers were Gordon Hayward with 33 points 8 rebounds, George Hill with 25 points, Joe Johnson with 18 points 6 rebounds and Dante Exum with 11 points. Charlotte Hornets (23-28) come back home Tuesday night to host the Brooklyn Nets who has lost eight straight games.
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