Hornets Learn the Terrible Truth About Getting Stung by Clippers

Here’s a little surprise for the guys on Hive Drive.

Just when the Charlotte Hornets were supposed to be kicking it into gear, the Clippers arrived and kicked them instead, running up a 17-point lead and winning, 116-107, Wednesday night, their third victory in four games.

The polite Charlotte crowd of 24,042, the only one in the NBA that is led in prayer before each game, booed. Hornet Coach Allan Bristow said his players had been “totally embarrassed from the start,” but his players were telling a different story.

“It’s embarrassing to a point,” Kendall Gill said, “but they just beat us. They’re not as terrible as some people say they are. They just beat us.”

That might not be all the Clippers aspire to be--”not as terrible as some people say”--but this is a club that lost 65 games last season, nine in a row in this one and turned the ball over 22 times in a loss at Atlanta on Tuesday. Wednesday they scored 40 points in the first quarter, 69 by halftime and held off the Hornets. Looked pretty good to them too.

“You get a vision of these guys,” Clipper Coach Bill Fitch said. “They’re going to get smarter, stronger, better. You still see skinny little guys in red getting knocked on the floor, but those bodies are going to get a lot more mature the next couple of years.”

The Hornets, struggling since the trade of Alonzo Mourning and scheduled on the road for 16 of their first 25 games, opened the season 11-14, but, beginning a long favorable stretch, had won their last two games in the Hive. While the Clippers were flying cross-country and losing to the Hawks, the Hornets were resting.

Oops, big mistake.

“Was that their first game after the holiday?” Pooh Richardson asked. “They looked like us last night in Atlanta.”

The Hornets, a woeful defensive team to begin with, were allowing opponents to shoot 49% from the field, tied for worst in the league, but that was nothing compared to the first quarter when the Clippers blazed away at 73%. In one stretch, the Clippers got dunks on four possessions in a row and Bristow, raging in a timeout huddle, smacked his clipboard with his hand.

By game’s end, all five Clipper starters had 17 points or more, led by Brian Williams’ 25. As a unit, the starters shot 57%.

“We dug our own hole,” Hornet center Matt Geiger said. “We jumped into it. Maybe if we could have played six quarters, we could have gotten out of it.”

The Hornets cut their deficit to four points twice early in the fourth quarter, but the Clippers kept making shots and moving the ball intelligently. The Hornets were forced to press and spread their defense even further and it wasn’t a pretty sight, except to the visitors from the West Coast.

“I told the guys,” Fitch said, “we had a lot of Boy Scouts out there--be prepared.

“We had twos [shooting guards] playing one [point], twos playing three [small forward]. But that was a good basketball team we beat and we’re glad to get it.”

Clipper Notes

Brian Williams’ 25 points gave him 99 in his last five games, his best run in his five pro seasons. Said Williams, laughing when a Clipper official noted that former Bruin George Zidek had played only seven minutes: “He just got Brianized, that’s all. He got cleaned, pressed and wrapped in plastic.” . . . The Clippers are off today, finish the trip with games in Orlando on Friday and Miami on Saturday.