Maddux Sports Blog

The Hornets can’t be happy with the loss of Chris Paul for at least a month thanks to a knee injury – it’s hard to be happy when you are losing perhaps the best point guard in the league. Still, the way that Darren Collison has played the last two games no one is really going to miss Paul at all. In his first game against New Orleans on Saturday the former UCLA guard erupted for 17 points and a gaudy 18 assists. Tonight he was almost as good against Phoenix, with 16 points and 14 rebounds – this time in just 36 minutes. These outbursts are the two career highs in assists for the rookie, and only his second and third time in double digits.

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The Hornets have become the first team to fire a coach this year by booting Byron Scott just a year and a half after he was named NBA Coach of the Year. The team had limped out to a 3-6 start, and two of those win hardly count because they were against the Clippers and Kings. I’d sum up the way the franchise handled this with two words – inevitable and stupid. It was inevitable because Scott had to go because of the start and because of the way the season last year went – a disappointing regular season and humiliating playoffs. Chris Paul was frustrated and the team has no more important task than keeping Paul happy. They are already over the luxury tax threshold so they can’t overhaul the roster in a meaningful way, so Scott was the only real option. The move was stupid, though, because of their choice of a replacement. The new head coach is general manager Jeff Bower. He has been with the team since 1995 and he built the current team so he knows them well, but he has never been a head coach and a couple of assistant stints atMarist and Penn State a hundred years ago are his only real bits of (barely) relevant experience. They have also hired Tim Floyd as Bower’s top assistant. Not only if Floyd coming off a disgraceful exit from USC, but his last coaching experience in the NBA was with the Hornets – and they fired him in 2004 after one season because he didn’t do a good job. I have no problem with getting rid of Scott, but only if they replace with a coach with a good chance of being better than Scott was. I just don’t really see that here.

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The second best team in the Western Conference, the Denver Nuggets (54-28), will meet the seventh seed New Orleans Hornets (49-33) in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In the four-game season series the teams split with the Nuggets, taking the last meeting, which was played on March 25, 101-88. Denver went 8-2 in their last 10 games, and the Hornets were 4-6 over their final 10.

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