The 2025-26 NBA season has begun!
The Charlotte Hornets and their fans are expecting to improve upon last year’s paltry 19 win season. Though that bar is low, better health and another high lottery pick could make Charlotte a much more formidable team than in recent years. Can LaMelo Ball and Co. take a step forward or is it another year in the basement for Buzz City?
Here are 3 important things to chew on as the season gets underway:
Collin Sexton now wears the purple and teal.
Sexton is certainly the biggest offseason addition to the Hornets roster. Across his 7 years in the NBA Sexton has averaged around 19ppg and has consistently shot above league average from distance (about 39% career) on moderate volume. The 8th overall pick in the 2018 draft will bring quality shooting and relentless play to a squad that desperately needs both.
Sexton’s presence brings two important wrinkles to the Hornets offense, both of which relate to LaMelo Ball. First, if LaMelo is sitting or is injured Collin can give Charlotte a starting-caliber guard to pilot the offense in his absence. Considering LaMelo’s lengthy injury history, Sexton is a great insurance policy.
Second, there’s no reason Ball and Sexton can’t be on the floor together, and to lessen LaMelo’s usage/burden on offense he needs a running mate like Sexton who is also a threat to any defense with or without the ball. Generating quality looks for LaMelo off-ball and being able to create quality shot attempts without LaMelo will give the offense depth and variation that it has simply lacked in recent years.
For the Hornets to truly become a threat on a nightly basis there’s 1 stat that simply has to change; FG%. Not to oversimplify what Charlotte needs to do to accumulate more wins, but no team in the entire league shot a worse percentage from the field than last year’s Hornets.
The arrival of Sexton and rookie Kon Knueppel should give the Hornets more reliable shot-making right away. Obviously that’s a positive thing, but featuring those two in the rotation still isn’t enough to give this franchise hopes of ending the league’s longest active playoff drought.
Every publication/sportsbook has the Hornets season win total somewhere in the high 20’s. A 30 win season is a realistic goal for this team. That would be outperforming preseason expectations and showing the kind of year-over-year improvement you want to see out of a young team that is ascending.
Having playoff expectations for this season is unrealistic, but clearing 30 wins for the first time in four years is exactly the type of step forward this team needs to take to prove they’re headed in the right direction.
Stats sourced from basketball-reference.com. Thank you for reading.
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