The SportCLT Hornets Draft Guide is available now for all subscribers. In it, we’ve sorted this year’s prospects by the usual basketball attributes, but also by how much they embody “Hornets DNA.”
It’s become a refrain for Charles Lee and Jeff Peterson when they’re talking about how they want to build this team, as well as for fans who finally saw, this season, an improving team with an established identity. And that identity is more or less what we’ve defined “Hornets DNA” as in the guide: an emphasis on motor, three-point shooting, and rebounding, especially offensive rebounding.
I want to take a second to denote how novel that is. Sports discourse is full of words like “culture,” “DNA,” “identity,” and other such intangibles that are supposedly the reason that bad teams stay bad, usually so that people don’t have to point fingers at bad deal-making, roster misevaluations, tactical shortcomings, or just plain talent deficits. And almost every time, when you hear about a team needing to find its identity so that it can be better, the identity in question just happens to be playing the sport the way a middle school coach would teach it. Establish the run, feed the paint, contact over power, short passes on the ground. Fundamentals of the game that are essential to learn but have been definitively proven to be less efficient at the highest levels. But they can be easily pointed to when a team is failing at the strategies that would get them better results if executed right.
We expect coaches to say certain things about the kind of team they want to have. I think a lot about this quote from an anonymous college football head coach in 2020: “‘OK, all the trick 'em, d--- 'em, bulls--- (sic), is that what we want it to look like? We want to win because we trick you? . . . Or are we going to beat you because we're physical, we're tough, we outrun you[?]‘“ Because sports are such a physical endeavor, it’s easy to get wrapped up in rhetoric that makes it sound like winning is as easy as being more physical and tougher than whoever is lining up across from you.
After watching the difference that Charles Lee and Jeff Peterson made with this team, I’m starting to believe that:
a) good teams are made by people who can move past such macho platitudes so they can actually analyze the sport they’re in charge of; and
b) the Hornets have such a coach-GM pair in Lee and Peterson.
That’s not to say they don’t want their team to be tough and physical, but that every time they talk about the kind of team they want to build, they’re very clearly talking about more than that.
For one thing, when defining Hornets DNA, they talk more about effort and want-to, which are also obviously universal desires but are more definable through playstyle and stats than “toughness.” And lo and behold, the Hornets ranked top-5 in the NBA in most offensive hustle stats, including offensive rebounding percentage, offensive loose ball recovery percentage, and points off screen assists per game.
And that’s not all of it. After a preseason loss in 2024, Lee had this to say about the culture he was building:
“Part of Hornets DNA is understanding the love and gratitude you need to have every day. It's the love for yourself, the love for your teammates, it's the gratitude for the opportunity to be in the NBA. . . I think as you saw today, and at practice, competitiveness brings out another level of togetherness...I'm proud of how the competitiveness and the togetherness continue to grow.”
As Matt Alquiza (author of the linked article) put it, the emphasis on “love,” “gratitude,” and “togetherness” isn’t necessarily what you’d expect from a professional sports coach.
In my opinion, Lee’s ability to look for the right kinds of softness as well as toughness has been key to making this team have a legitimate, on-court identity beyond just being better than this franchise has been lately.
Motor, three-point shooting, and rebounding. Love for the game, love for your teammates, and fully committing to competing for 48 minutes. These Hornets are still a work in progress; the Play-In tournament showed that their interior defense still isn’t playoff-quality and even though the defensive efficiency was pretty good in the second half of the season, the defensive hustle numbers weren’t nearly as good as the offensive ones.
But I think it’s pretty cool that it’s work in progress where you can actually see the work progressing instead of that just being a euphemism for “not good enough.” So often, “identity” just means better players and better coaches.
But having watched this season and how Lee and Peterson operate, I can’t help thinking that Hornets DNA is for real, and that this team growing into it is going to continue to lead them towards a level of sustained success we haven’t seen this century.