Clifford Grows Furious with Hornets' Defense, 'All We Care About is Scoring'

Steve Clifford was hired to be the Charlotte Hornets' head coach to help fix the defensive issues the team had a year ago, which essentially held them back from finishing higher in the Eastern Conference standings.

Unfortunately, things haven't necessarily gone to plan for the head coach, but it's not entirely his fault. Injuries have played a big part in that but the front office didn't really make any changes to the roster in the offseason to help increase the team's ability to defend, particularly inside.

Following an overtime loss to the Detroit Pistons on Wednesday night, Clifford did not hold back his emotions in the postgame press conference. He told us that there was no need to ask any questions and he dove right into all of the things that went wrong that night, basically giving the four or five of us in the press conference room an abbreviated version of his locker room speech to the team.

"Until we care about something besides how many points we score, we’re not going to win much. Can’t play like that. Our offense was good. Five of the last seven games we’ve been pretty good on offense. We are playing no defense. Not one guy. There’s not one bright spot. We don’t run back on defense, we don’t guard the ball, our pick and-roll stuff, all stuff that was good. I think we were as high as about 12th or 13th in defense about 10 games ago, and we’re right back to where we started, ground zero. All we want to be is, ‘Let’s try to outscore the other team.’ That doesn’t work in the NBA. Never works.

"What I just told them, this is either you build a game that will actually work at the end of the year when you play the important games, or you don’t. That’s it. That’s what the NBA is all about. It’s not that we don’t have the talent to do it. All we care about is scoring. That’s it. If you’re going to try to play like that, you better have like five All-Stars, and we don’t have that kind of talent. It’s not something that will work. We’re either going to decide to get back to playing with a defensive effort (or not). It’s not like we’re not trying to win, it's we go about it all wrong. There’s always a team every year that they get there and what happens? They get drilled because they don’t have the game. They don’t have the right kind of game. You can’t just outscore people in the NBA. You can’t. You can’t. You can’t decide you’re not going to do the things that take effort, like rebounding or getting loose balls, or putting your body in front of the ball. You can’t. It just doesn’t work that way. And that’s what we’re trying to do right now.”

To be frank, I appreciated the emotion and the brutal, yet honest assessment of the team. He could have fielded three or four questions that night but it wouldn't have been anything new. It's the same stuff every night from this team. So instead of us rewording the same questions, he did us all a favor and got straight to the point.

In terms of what this actually means for the team, well, it could mean change is coming...at some point. No, I don't expect any trades to be made in the coming days or anything like that, but down the line? Absolutely. This team has to have some sort of identity defensively or else they stand no chance. Last year, they were able to make up for the lapses on the defensive end because of how efficient the offense was. When you go from 6th to 27th in three-point percentage, 3rd to 25th in scoring, and 1st to 17th in assists per game, the margin for error becomes razor-thin all of a sudden.

If the Hornets are still struggling to win games by the time the trade deadline comes around, you can expect GM Mitch Kupchak to make a few moves to 1. help create more of a defensive identity and 2. build for the future.

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