The Charlotte Hornets’ 2025-26 NBA season was refreshing, memorable, encouraging, enjoyable… and most importantly, irrefutably successful.
Rarely do struggling professional sports franchises “turn things around” in a single offseason. Yet, that’s exactly what happened in Charles Lee’s second season as head coach of the Hornets.
There are plenty of league-wide rankings and various metrics you can highlight as indicators of a successful season for Charlotte. Finding and listing all of them would be laborious and long-winded, so here’s a handful of stats that show some of what the Hornets’ were able to accomplish this past year:
The Charlotte Hornets led the NBA in 3 point makes per game with 16.4 (Golden State was 2nd with 15.7). Not only did they lead the league in threes per game, they did it efficiently on high volume.
CLT finished 3rd in three point percentage while shooting the second-highest amount of threes per night. A podium finish in makes, attempts, and percentage tells you the perimeter attack employed by Charles Lee is undeniably dangerous.
The Hornets finished 2nd in the NBA (behind the Clippers) in free throw percentage, hitting nearly 82% of their free throws as a team.
Charlotte was a top-5 rebounding team. They finished 5th in offensive rebounds, 8th in defensive rebounds, and 5th in total rebounds. Their propensity to secure extra possessions after a missed shot proved to be an important strength they could rely on.
If you prefer rebounding percentage as a stat, those also cement the Hornets as an excellent rebounding team as they finished top-5 in both oREB% and dREB% (4th and 3rd respectively).
Also of significance, the Hornets finished the year with the 5th best offensive rating, and a +5 net rating, good for 8th best in the league.
Honestly, these select bits of data hardly begin to tell the whole story; they’re just a few big picture team-based statistics. What really made this team and season feel special was that from about mid-January until the end of the season, the Hornets were legitimately one of the NBA’s best teams, and the starting lineup was statistically one of the most dominant ever.
In addition to all of that, the list of noteworthy individual player stats and accomplishments is equally as impressive (as you might expect).
Unquestionably, rookie Kon Knueppel played a massive role in Charlotte’s incredible turnaround; he led the league in 3 point makes, something no rookie had ever done. He didn’t win rookie of the year, but he made sure it was a two man race for the award between him and eventual winner/college teammate Cooper Flagg.
Knueppel’s fellow rookies Sion James and Ryan Kalkbrenner deserve recognition as well. Both players played significant minutes right away and contributed to winning basketball as second round picks.
James played in all 82 games and quickly cemented himself as a very capable perimeter defender while Kalkbrenner led all rookies in FG%, blocks, and offensive rebounds.
The other rookie Hornet is Liam McNeeley, who helped the Greensboro Swarm win their first ever G-league championship…
…These four players make up what is bound to be the best draft class in franchise history.
Incredibly, Kon Knueppel and LaMelo Ball were first and second in the league in total three point makes. They joined the legendary duo of Steph Curry and Klay Thompson as the only teammates to ever accomplish that feat in a season.
Though Knueppel fell just short of bringing home a trophy for his stellar season, teammate Moussa Diabaté was recognized for his hard work as he earned the 2025-26 Kia NBA Hustle Award.
Multiple Hornets being in the running for (and winning!) league-wide awards at the end of the season is unfamiliar territory, in the best way possible.
Even those who pay virtually no attention to this team were forced to take notice of a year-over-year win total increase of 25 games.
Charlotte finished with a record of 44-38 and though they finished just 6 games over .500 and couldn’t secure a playoff series, fans were still treated to an electric postseason game in Charlotte where the Hornets ended the Miami Heat’s season in front of a sold out crowd.
In case it hasn’t been made clear…It’s truly difficult to overstate how much better this season’s Hornets were compared to recent years.
The resounding success of the 2025-26 season energized this franchise and fanbase in a way that was unfathomable before the season began. It was more than just a winning season, it was the incredible rookie class, the blowouts, the sellout crowds, the historic shooting, the taste of postseason basketball in Charlotte for the first time in years, the breaking of numerous records…
…All of these things and more gave Charlotte optimism and positive momentum they’ve lacked for the better part of a decade.
For Hornets fans, it truly was A Season To Remember.
Stats sourced from basketball-reference.com and NBA.com. Thank you for reading.
