Watching The Charlotte Hornets, Breaking Through as Modestly as Possible

The 2015-16 NBA regular season winds down with all the attention on the margins. On Wednesday night, the Golden State Warriors will have a chance to win an unprecedented 73rd game, a feat made all the more impressive by the contemporary requirement that they answer daily questions about the advisability of trying to set the record even as they are doing it. Last week, meanwhile, the Philadelphia 76ers accepted the rococo resignation letter of general manager Sam Hinkie, whose lose-now-win-later long con had kneecapped the franchise it was supposed to help, along with the numerous young careers entrusted to him, for either not enough time or too long.

In this climate, the league sometimes seems to exist only in extremes of ideology or fortune—all wild success and heinous failure, moonshots that pay off big or backfire with devastating consequence. The NBA does have a middle class, though, however ignored or underrepresented, and this year it is home to one of the happier stories in the game. The Charlotte Hornets, with a game left to play, have already bettered last season's win total by 14, and with a top-10 offense and defense, they figure to present a formidable obstacle to whichever team draws them in the first round.

More impressive than the scope of the improvement, though, is the style of it. The Hornets' roster consists of misfits of every stripe—players too short, too lumbering, defensively lacking or offensively limited—emerging from all kinds of professional doldrums to form a deceptively cohesive squad.

A rise like this has its own rewards, of course; a Charlotte team has a chance to advance past the first round of the playoffs for the first time since Baron Davis was lighting it up for the original Hornets in the early aughts. But these Hornets also seem to stand for an ambition largely forgotten during an era of grand design. In their makeup and nightly play, they are basketball foragers. They take the league's leftovers and refurbish them. They press minor advantages and pull tricks. They have inched their way towards adequacy from something like absolute zero, and they play with hard-earned joy. All of which is to say that, whatever happens after this, they are a success.

Even if he were not the Hornets' best player, Kemba Walker would be their avatar. The collegiate hero left the University of Connecticut in 2011 as a national champion, and with everything that makes NCAA stars struggle at the next level. Officially and laughably listed at six-one, Walker was a vervy volume shooter with little patience and few physical advantages, and he spent his first few NBA seasons chucking fadeaways for teams that ranged from historically bad to borderline passable. There are players like him who spend their whole NBA lives doing just that.

This year, helped along by a balanced offense installed by coach Steve Clifford that has relieved him of some ball-handling obligations, Walker has leveraged his gifts to unforeseen effect. He has a juddering dribble and, once he reaches the elbow, a pronounced optimism about his ability to get a shot off. His maneuvers sometimes start with a bit of aimlessness, but this can be a ploy; he'll go behind his back twice in a row, pause, and then dart by to toss up a floater or scoop a pass under a defender's armpit. Walker gives the impression of processing time at a higher rate than the other players on the court, of speeding and slowing from instant to instant while everyone else cruises at constant rates. There are not many players that can do this.

The rest of the Charlotte hierarchy is straightforward. Below Walker, who averages 21 points a game and runs the pick-and-rolls when things get tight, there is a layer of cooperative support to which just about every other relevant Hornet belongs in more or less equal proportion. Nicolas Batum, picked up at Portland's offseason fire sale, strolls around flicking skip passes and reaching into passing lanes. Marvin Williams, who never quite lived up to his draft slot in Atlanta, spots up and cans threes and is generally more useful than he has ever been before. Cody Zeller rolls hard down the lane, grabs nine rebounds a game, and has the dunking aesthetic of a man clinging to the edge of a skyscraper. Former MVP candidate Al Jefferson now comes off the bench to work his downtempo post game, and ex-phenomenon Jeremy Lin does the same to maneuver back and forth behind ball screens.

The end result of so many distinct talents of similar value is a smooth, deferential approach. The ball does not so much swing as cycle, reaching the lane on one side of the court, popping out to the three-point line on the other, burbling along like water through a fountain. Hand-offs and kick-outs abound. This is speculation, of course, but there is the sense that all those muddled individual histories make the Hornets uniquely suited to playing in this fashion. In different ways, they have all learned how contingent NBA success is, and how prolonged the stretches between it can last. They seem bound by a pact to let the current run last as long and as happily as it can.

It likely won't last all that much longer, at least this season. The Hornets are plenty good enough to hang with Miami or Boston in their opening series—Charlotte's 14-point victory over the Celtics on Monday night looked eminently repeatable—but after that the East's better teams wait to squash any burgeoning run. Whenever the offseason arrives, they'll have to hope the good vibes they've accrued can stand up to the realities of team-building, as Batum, Jefferson, and Williams all hit free agency this summer. According to the league's logic, this Charlotte team will be judged less by what it has put together this year than by what it can keep for the next.

Still, this team has already accomplished something, however minor. In an atmosphere where spectacle, good or bad, seems the only path to relevance, the Hornets have marked out space for modest improvement. Next to the record-breaking and manifesto-pushing, this may seem silly, and that sense will be amplified if the offseason goes as poorly as it might. But at the very least, the Hornets have played a full season of basketball that is much better—much lighter and more fun and tougher in any number of subtle ways—than their fans have seen in a long time. It's an achievement that's out of vogue, maybe, but which will never really go out of style.