No, Seriously, Pay Attention To The Charlotte Hornets

Nobody in the NBA has done nondescript quite like the Charlotte Hornets, and nobody has done it for as long. By long, in this context, we mean "forever." They have been the quintessential (and quit-essential, if truth be told) member of the league's ultra-forgettable Southeast Division since the franchise's second origin in '04-05, reliably turning purple and teal into washed-out gray on a yearly basis. The first Charlotte NBA team became what we now know as the New Orleans Pelicans when they left town in 2002, with all the vacuum-packed irrelevance that implies; the current incarnation began as an expansion team and has been the worst team in the league by aggregate record since, Sacramento and Washington included. The new iteration of the Bobcats/Hornets have played fewer playoff games than anyone else, been eliminated in the first round each time, and managed to further besmirch the name of Michael Jordan in the process. It can fairly be said that convincing Jordan to trade in his ownership for a run at NASCAR has been the franchise's most noteworthy achievement. But noteworthy isn't what the Hornets do. Mostly it is their invisibility in an invisible division that sets them apart from, well, nothing, really. Wednesday night marked just the second time in the past nine years that they have even been above .500 this late in a season. They are on the verge of knowing the sweet life provided by the play-in tournament, in large part because Milwaukee stinks and everyone below them is turbo-tanking; if they make it, Charlotte's season will include an 83rd game for the first time in a decade. That fact, taken on its own, speaks only to the number of teams in the league currently forced to be horrible by management fiat. What makes these Hornets worth your time, at least for the few minutes you spend plowing through this thicket of arglebargle, is that they have lately been both quite good and quite fun to watch. In a league dominated by dissatisfaction from top to bottom, in which only Nico Harrison's besmirched reputation is even trying to make a comeback, the Hornets are kicking ass and leaving the name-taking to others. And that's saying something for a team that is 32-31 as dawn broke and tied with the (say it with us now) nondescript Atlanta Hawks.