Free Hornets Basketball For Carolinas is Bigger Than You Realize

I still vividly remember the creak of my mother’s bedroom floor as I walked in to get my game day bean bag set up.

I’ve never seen a bean bag quite like it; shaped like someone testing an ergonomic experiment that never should have made it past production.

That monstrosity of a bean bag chair still takes up space in my office to this day.

Now, I’m not sure about you all, but there were two cable boxes in my house growing up. Neither was allowed in my room.

So watching the Charlotte Hornets became something I did alone in my mom’s room, where the second box lived, often unused.

That specific ambiance, along with Fox Sports Southeast, helped me learn to love the NBA through the Hornets. I was up there often while my parents did their own thing downstairs.

Reminiscing on FSSE was purposeful, but it’s not the channel, the namesake, and most certainly not the cable box or my mom’s bedroom that I miss.

It’s always been the local, at-will access Regional Sports Networks used to provide that I miss.

Or maybe I should say “missed”.

I’ve been pleading to get something similar back ever since, and the Hornets have finally taken a step in the right direction. For the 2026-2027 season, 75 of 82 Hornets games will be free everywhere in the Carolinas and as far north as Roanoke, Virginia.

Roanoke is a cool town, and there’s a random, very large white metal star perched up somewhere on a mountain there. I’ve visited, but I don’t particularly care about Virginia. No offense, Roanoke, but the Carolinas need free Hornets more than you guys.

I urge anyone at Spectrum Center reading this to encourage ownership to make it permanent in the Carolinas after this year, even at a loss to the bosses.

THIS right here is how you actually grow your fanbase, and to co-owners Gabe Plotkin and Rick Schnall: There’s no quantitative price tag you could stick on that value.

But I promise you that the tag is larger than you could possibly imagine.

Had I — Owen Watterson — needed to ask my family for an obscure $19.99-a-month add-on just to watch the Hornets (or my beloved, but buried, Bobcats)?

I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be the same person, at the very least.

Charlotte was something my small, college-football-crazed hometown didn’t talk about or care about. I still don’t know a Hornets fan from my community…

It was something I could call my own. It became intertwined with my personality.

It was never a marketing analyst’s ploy for a Star Wars-themed or Kids Night celebration that adorned me in purple and teal, though; the Hornets themselves did nothing.

The league simply had a more accessible regional TV structure for its product in every market. By proxy, I fell in love with the NBA through FSSE before the Sinclair restructuring changed everything.

The TV product we’ve had for close to a decade now reflects an NBA League Office still struggling to find its footing on regional television broadcast deals after that collapse and ensuing chaos from Sinclair.

The TV rights have been mishandled for years, leaving little room for teams like Charlotte to organically reach fans as they once did.

The Hornets have tried to keep themselves afloat in the modern attention ecosystem, but it has not solved the problem that Fox Sports used to solve for fans:

Allowing local fans to organically find their team, in the first place.

Sure, cable was the original paywall. That’s fair to say. C-SET was also prominent in the early years of the Bobcats, and that was, well -- atrocious. But by the early 2010s, it really felt like the formula was working pretty well: If you had your bare-minimum cable package, you’d get access to your local pro teams through Fox Sports’ regional channels. That was an incredible benefit to teams in terms of growing their reach.

Long-tenured Hornets fans have typically been grown slowly and stubbornly, in living rooms and bedrooms across the Carolinas, when some kid or teenager decides:

“This team is merely hours away. I can be there. Win or lose, and even with a lot of losing, I can be a part of this now.”

Before that kid can decide, the team has to be there and available to discover in the first place.

That pipeline seems to have been broken for a while now.

You don’t subscribe your way into loving a team or start loving them through highlights. You stumble into it.

To subscribe at all, there must be prior knowledge or interest in what you're subscribing to.

In an ideal world, you find it unexpectedly -- through your parents or on your own -- and you stay because something resonates with you… and because it’s easy and free to access.

It makes you feel like you have a part to play and a larger reason to care.

That’s the part the NBA seems to have forgotten, as it’s allowed regional access to become collateral damage to its larger TV rights arms race.

The NBA doesn’t need another media partner shuffle, a new app, or another temporary workaround.

It needs to remember that access shouldn’t be a luxury for regional fans. It should be the league’s foundation - even if it’s at a monetary loss for Adam Silver, the board of governors, or the team owners.

It’s how a love of basketball can start and how loyalty forms for lifelong followers of a team. It’s how a kid like me ends up caring deeply about a basketball team I may never have found without the very same organic reach I’m writing about the importance of right now.

Charlotte is finally back again this season and is offering incredible regional access to local fans, both found and unfound. It truly has the potential to extend the organization's footprint farther than they realize.

It may not be guaranteed past this season.

But I’ll be damned if I don’t put out the call to try to make that a reality.

Subscribe to our FREE Newsletter for the latest news and updates on the Charlotte Hornets

Add us as a preferred source on Google