Could the Charlotte Hornets be a surprise playoff team next season?

The Charlotte Hornets will, unfortunately, be unable to take place in the NBA’s revised finish to the regular season. This means that next season will be when we can finally see them play again. Could they improve enough to sneak into the playoffs?

It appears that the Charlotte Hornets will finish the 2019-2020 NBA season with just 23 wins. That’s 16 fewer wins than the previous year, but this season will surely come with an asterisk for every team, as it was postponed and restarted again, albeit with a vastly unfamiliar format.

For teams like the Hornets, who could not be a part of this “restart,” next season is already at the forefront of their minds. That doesn’t mean that this season doesn’t still sting, at least in terms of the end result.

It will be the fourth consecutive year the team misses the playoffs, tying the second-longest drought in team history, and the longest such streak since they were the Bobcats. Even if they had played a full season, the team would have most likely failed to avoid this fate.

So, could next season be their year to make it back? Before the season was put on hold, the Hornets were pretty much out of the playoffs, a full seven games back behind the Orlando Magic for the final playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.

As bad as this past season appeared at times for the Charlotte Hornets, they could be in a much different position if more things had gone their way.

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There were 17 games left in the year for Charlotte when the NBA postponed the remainder of the season. 12 of those games were going to be against teams who are now in this league-approved finale taking place later this summer.

About a month or so ago, I did some educated guessing on what the Hornets’ final regular-season record would have been had the season played out normally. I had them finishing 29-53, ten games back of where they finished the year before, meaning they would close out right around 6-11 during the final stretch of the year.

Up until that point in the season, Charlotte had 11 losses where the margin of defeat was less than 5 points. Sadly, most of their defeats were by a margin greater than that, with a solid chunk of those losses being by double-digits.

Had just five of those close games gone the Hornets’ way, their final record would have been 34-48 after my predictions, just five wins fewer than the previous year even with their all-time best player still leading the way. Over their last 13 games, before the season stopped, the Hornets went 7-6, including impressive wins over the Houston Rockets and Miami Heat.

It was clear that James Borrego and the staff had found something that, while not necessarily a playoff-caliber lineup and scheme, was definitely improving. Let’s just say my earlier predictions for their remaining 17 games were wrong, and the team won two or three more games over that final 17, meaning an 8-9 or 9-8 record over that span.

They would have finished the year with a 15-15 or 16-14 record over their last 30 games. That’s a nice way to end the year for a team that had been getting pushed by around by just about everyone earlier in the year.

Winning a few more close games and finishing the year strong, they could have won anywhere from 35-37 games. In a fairly weak Eastern Conference, that might have put them in the top-eight. So, this team is just a few breaks here and there from seeing the postseason again, or so it would seem.

That’s quite the testament to what Borrego and crew had seemingly discovered just after the All-Star break. It is true he had experimented with different lineups, such as inserting Bismack Biyombo into the starting five, so the staff clearly found something that worked to a certain degree.

Several questions remain, though. Can that improvement transition from this year to next? Can the younger guys like P.J. Washington, Miles Bridges, and the Martin twins take the leap that Devonte’ Graham and, to a slightly lesser extent, Terry Rozier did?

Can their new additions via the NBA Draft help be the catalyst that gets them over the hump? Can they find the right asset in free agency that gives them the push they need? And, do they re-sign any of the guys on expiring contracts that may or may not be keys to Borrego’s system?

The ebb and flow of sports are nigh impossible to ascertain at any given time. Yet, by all observations, Charlotte was and is a team currently trending upwards. Anything can happen that could derail that, obviously, and if anyone knows of that unfortunate truth, it’s Charlotte Hornets fans.

Personally, I feel like this team is either one or two pieces away from being a top-eight team in the East, or a team that will be at the very bottom of the conference for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure how much longer this team can be mired in the 9th or 10th spot year after year, but all signs point to the other teams right there with them getting better in a few years.

So, this upcoming season will tell us a lot about the team, but towards the end of their abbreviated campaign, they showed a tiny little glimpse of something that could be the start of their ascension. All I know is that the last time this organization was in this exact situation, fans were cheering the team on in a few extra games during the month of April.