The injury report was supposed to settle this for Cleveland. Charlotte was missing its 3 best perimeter players, plus Grant Williams, and Moussa Diabate was downgraded from questionable to out on game day, leaving an already thin frontcourt even thinner. The Cavs had their own holes, with Sam Merrill (elbow) and Jaylon Tyson (ankle) out, but the preview's case was that Cleveland's 5-man core would beat a Charlotte roster held together with tape. It didn't.
The 1st quarter went the way you'd expect from 2 teams feeling each other out: 29-28 Charlotte. Then the Hornets won the 2nd quarter 40-25 and went to the locker room up 69-53. That was where it fell apart for Cleveland. A team that has hung with Oklahoma City twice this month gave up 40 in a quarter to a lineup missing Miller, Knueppel and Schroder.
The 3rd quarter was worse. Charlotte won it 38-27 and took a 107-80 lead into the 4th, and according to SI's game report the lead peaked at 33. For a team that had been losing home games by 33 and 39, that's a full flip of the script. The Hornets had 2 days of rest since the Boston loss, the Cavs had 1 since losing to the Knicks, and through 3 quarters Charlotte looked like the fresher, sharper team by a mile.
Cleveland made it interesting late. The Cavs won the 4th 32-17 and got the margin down to 8, per SI, before Charlotte steadied and held on. It's the kind of rally that makes a box score look closer than the game was. The question going in was whether Evan Mobley could carry the paint again without Jarrett Allen the way he did against Philadelphia. The individual lines weren't available for this recap, but the team totals answer it well enough. Cleveland gave up 124 to a short-handed roster, so whatever Mobley and Donovan Mitchell did, it wasn't enough to stop the bleeding in the middle 2 quarters.
For Cleveland, this is a bad loss in a bad stretch. The Cavs have now lost 2 straight and are 1-4 in the last 5. The Thunder and Knicks losses could be filed under tough opponents, but this one can't. Charlotte gets a much-needed win, and the bigger takeaway is that this backcourt-less group put up 124 points. With Knueppel and Schroder out for weeks, the Hornets will need to keep finding offense like this from somewhere.
The preview called this a mismatch on paper, and it was, just not in the direction the board had it. Cleveland closed as a big road favorite and lost by 12 to a team missing 5 players. The 4th-quarter run keeps the Cavs from a full-blown embarrassment, but going down 33 to this Hornets roster is the real result.
