**What:** Charlotte Hornets (2-3) (1-1 home) vs Minnesota Timberwolves (2-3) (1-1 away)
**When:** 6:00pm Eastern
**Where:** Spectrum Center; Charlotte, NC
**How to watch:** FanDuel Sports Network, NBA League Pass
**Game Lines:** Hornets +5.5, Hornets money line +175, O/U 229.5
**Injuries:**
Hornets: Brandon Miller-out (shoulder), Josh Green-out (shoulder), Grant Williams-out (knee)
Timberwolves: Jaylen Clark-questionable (calf), Anthony Edwards-out (hamstring)
For the second straight game, the Hornets face a team that’s underperforming relative to expectations. As we saw on Thursday, it is not safe to assume that those kinds of trends will continue when it involves the Hornets. The Magic had been an abhorrent jump shooting team all season until they played the Hornets. Then they were splashing threes from all over the floor.
That said, the Timberwolves are dealing with a slightly different struggle. While the Magic were simply underperforming, the Timberwolves are struggling specifically when Anthony Edwards isn’t playing. They were 1-1 in his two full games and managed to scrape out a win against a bad Pacers team when Edwards left early. They’ve gone 0-2 in the two games without him. He’s out again tonight, so that helps the Hornets odds.
Julius Randle and Jaden (brother of Jalen) McDaniels have picked up the slack in Edwards’ absence. The two have been far and away the Wolves’ leading scorers in the two games without their star. They’re obviously the big names to watch, but I’m personally more concerned with the Minnesota bigs. Rudy Gobert is by no means an offensive threat, but neither Moussa Diabate nor Ryan Kalkbrenner are good match-ups for him. Diabate is just too small and Kalkbrenner isn’t aggressive enough to deal with Gobert’s size and length. Naz Reid is terrifying as a stretch big coming off the bench.
For their part, the Hornets have to figure out what they’re doing on the defensive end. They’ve been hemorrhaging points in their last two games in part because they’ve lacked a little bit of the edge they had in the first couple games of the season. They need to be disruptive defensively, which should be a little bit easier against a team that doesn’t share the ball that well and is missing their best creator.
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