**What:** Charlotte Hornets (25-28) (11-13 home) vs Detroit Pistons (38-13) (16-7 away)
**When:** 7:00pm Eastern
**Where:** Spectrum Center; Charlotte, NC
**How to watch:** FanDuel Sports Network, NBA League Pass
**Outfitting:** Hornets–Icon (teal), Pistons–Statement (black)
**Game Lines:** Hornets +3.5, Hornets money line +130, O/U 223.5
**Injuries:**
Hornets: Coby White-out (calf), Malaki Branham-out (not with team)
Pistons: Jalen Duren-probable (knee), Ron Holland II-out (personal), Dario Saric-out (not with team)
The Hornets eked out a win over the Hawks in Atlanta on Saturday night. That has them up to nine wins in a row and just a half game out of the nine seed, which is coincidentally held by those very same Hawks. The Hornets will get another crack at them on Wednesday, but first they have to deal with this Pistons team.
Those pesky Pistons. They’re this year’s version of last year’s Cavaliers. They’ve made a pretty unexpected leap into contention and have a comfortable grasp on the top seed in the Eastern Conference. They play absolutely suffocating defense and get enough on offense from mostly Cade Cunningham to make it all work.
These teams have played once so far this year, and the Pistons beat the snot out of the Hornets both physically and on the scoreboard. They are a rough bunch, and the grabbing and checking that they played with really got under the Hornets’ collective skin. But that Hornets team was 9-19 at the time and generally pretty bad at basketball. They’ve gone 16-9 since that loss and have done much better dealing with opponents getting handsy. The Rockets and Spurs presented similar challenges in recent weeks, and the Hornets prevailed over both of them. That’s the same blueprint for the game tonight.
Similar to those two aforementioned teams, the Pistons are reliant on their supercharged defense. Prioritizing that side of the ball has led to a few holes on the other end, and that’s where the Hornets have capitalized on teams during this really good run of play. The Pistons don’t shoot a lot of threes, and they don’t make a lot of the ones they do shoot. Duncan Robinson takes almost a quarter of their 3-point attempts on all his own, and he’s obviously very good at that. The Pistons brought Kevin Huerter in to try to help with that, but he only played eight minutes in his debut, so we don’t know what that looks like. Otherwise, the Hornets can give a little bit of extra space off the perimeter to help protect the paint. That’s what they’ve done against other unwilling 3-point shooting teams to great success. They need to get bodies in front of the rim and force the Pistons to choose between close shots over multiple defenders or high volume 3-point shooting.
On offense, the Hornets are going to need some 3-pointers to drop. They’ve had some up and downs in the latter parts of this winning streak. It’ll be really hard to unseat the Pistons without getting a few spurts of offense from hot 3-point shooting. They’ll need a few of those moments and more of their pesky defense to pull off the upset.
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