The Charlotte Hornets’ offense in Sunday’s Game 1 of the Eastern Conference semifinals was offensive only to the senses and to the basketball purist. As the old saying goes, it laid enough bricks to build a new Sears Tower.
Still, the Hornets refused to ascribe their poor performance to the Bulls’ defense. The problem, most of them insisted, was that they just missed shots, and Anthony Mason wouldn’t even go that far.
Asked about the Bulls’ defense, the burly Hornets forward sneered and said, “If that’s defense, that’s a problem (for the Bulls). We’re defending ourselves.”
Mind set: It’s called the shooter’s mentality, and it was on vivid display Sunday as the Hornets kept launching brick after brick. Did they ever think of altering their approach? Nope. The true shooter’s mentality doesn’t allow that.
“Anybody who shoots the ball at this level feels the next one’s got to be good,” explained guard David Wesley, who hit three of his first four shots and one of his last five. “So we just continued to shoot from the perimeter. I don’t think they were difficult shots. They weren’t hard shots. The Bulls weren’t pushing us into those shots. We were wide open.”
“We had a lot of wide-open shots and they just didn’t go down,” echoed forward Glen Rice, who hit three of his first six and six of his last 19. “You’re going to have nights like this when you can’t hit the side of a barn. We’ve got to keep shooting the ball with confidence and hopefully things will turn around. Tonight they didn’t turn around.”
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Psychic friends: Guarding Michael Jordan is hard enough. But what the Hornets discovered again on Sunday was that mind-reading seems to be a requirement.
“We tried basically to have Bobby Phills play him one-on-one,” coach Dave Cowens said. “We helped some with Vlade Divac early on. The problem is he just beats you so many ways. He is always looking to be a facilitator, and then he can take over with the clock running down.”
Quick turnaround: The Hornets were forced to face the Bulls only 36 hours after closing out Atlanta in their opening-round series, and that presented some problems of its own.
“You just don’t have a chance to prepare the way you’d like to,” Cowens said. “We had a lot of time to prepare for Atlanta. But here we’ve just been able to look at some film and try to make some decisions on what we want to do in a general sense.”
The Hornets, who lost three straight to the Bulls after beating them in the season’s first meeting. couldn’t even get much help from B.J. Armstrong. The veteran guard spent his first six NBA seasons with the Bulls and is familiar with both the triangle offense and their favorite defensive schemes.
“It’s a matter of changing modes from what we were able to do in the Atlanta series and having to establish what we have to do to win this series,” Armstrong said. “Within 36 hours we have to make a complete turnaround on how we play, what we have to do, then create new habits and try to adjust what we’ve been doing.”
Still Cowens expects to draw on Armstrong’s knowledge of the Bulls, and he’ll ask him to help prepare the Hornets for the remaining games of the series.
Shedding no tears: During his time in Chicago, Armstrong was never overly emotional or sentimental. It was no surprise then that he was detached on his return to the United Center, even while facing a series with the Bulls.
“I’m done,” he said. “I played here in Chicago for a number of years and have many great memories. But my career has moved on.”
The gray panther: Cowens, a Celtics star in the ’70s, was asked what problems quick turnarounds caused him back when he was playing. “That’s such a long time, I forget how that affected me,” he said with a laugh.
Means nothing: In the Atlanta series, the Hornets were outscored in the first quarter in each of the four games. Still, they took that series 3-1. On Sunday the Hornets blew away the Bulls in the first quarter 23-15. Then they turned around and dropped the game 83-70.