With the Golden State Warriors off to the best start in NBA history at 31-2, there has been plenty of discussion about whether their success is replicable. The answer is probably not, given that Golden State has two of the league's most singular talents in MVP Stephen Curry and uber-versatile big man Draymond Green.
However, learning from the Warriors isn't quite the same as duplicating them, and an unlikely team on the other side of the country seems to have taken some important lessons from the reigning NBA champs: the Charlotte Hornets, owned by Michael Jordan, the leader of the team Golden State is chasing for the best record in NBA history.
The Hornets, who coincidentally have Curry's father, Dell, as color TV analyst, and are Steph Curry's hometown team (he grew up in Charlotte), have embraced a similar offensive style to get back in playoff contention after a disappointing 2014-15 season.
The Hornets discover the 3-pointer
Of the NBA's four top teams in the percentage of shot attempts from 3-point range, three reached the conference finals last season: the Warriors (second), of course, plus the teams Golden State beat in the conference finals (the Houston Rockets, first) and NBA Finals (Cleveland Cavaliers, fourth).
The Hornets are the unlikely interloper in that star-studded group, having taken more than 34 percent of their shots from beyond the arc -- the league's third-highest mark. That's a dramatic change from last season, when Charlotte ranked 24th in 3-attempt rate and made a league-low 31.8 percent of its shots from long distance.
And it's not a coincidence that the Hornets joined other successful teams in shooting 3s on a frequent basis. During the preseason, Charlotte head coach Steve Clifford said the team was paying attention to what won last season.
"If you look at trends in this league, 3-point shooting percentage was the No. 1 factor in why teams won," Clifford said. "The five best 3-point shooting teams were the four teams who played in the conference finals and then the Clippers. All five of them were top 10 all-time in the NBA. That's the way this league has gone."
Nearly every move the Hornets' front office (led by general manager Rich Cho, with Jordan playing a very prominent role) made this summer came with outside shooting in mind. They swapped the poor-shooting Lance Stephenson (who posted the lowest 3-point percentage ever for a player with more than 100 attempts by shooting 17.1 percent in 2014-15) for Spencer Hawes, a 7-footer who shoots 3s, then drafted another such player in Frank Kaminsky.
Charlotte also added perimeter punch to the bench by signing Jeremy Lin as a free agent and dealing for little-used Jeremy Lamb from the Oklahoma City Thunder. Those four players are the core of the Hornets' second unit and all have attempted at least 44 3s this season. So too have four of Charlotte's five regular starters, including newcomer Nicolas Batum, whose 181 attempts lead the team and rank among the league's top 20 players.
In terms of shooting, it didn't hurt when the Hornets lost starting small forward Michael Kidd-Gilchrist to shoulder surgery during the preseason. As good as Kidd-Gilchrist is defensively, he didn't attempt a single 3-pointer all of last season, and replacement P.J. Hairston has already made 37.
Add it up, and the results are stunning. Last season, 22.6 percent of Charlotte's shots were 3s, which ranked 24th in the NBA. The Hornets' increase of 11.6 percentage points in 3-point rate would be the third-largest in NBA history from one season to the next.
And remember, 1994-95 was the first season the NBA temporarily moved the 3-point line in to 22 feet around the entirety of the arc, explaining why the Hawks and Warriors dramatically increased their rate of 3 attempts. The 2007-08 Magic, whose new coach that season was Stan Van Gundy, are the only team to see a greater uptick in 3 attempts from the same distance than Charlotte this year.
More 3s means better offense
Now here's the funny thing: Unlike Golden State, the Hornets still aren't very good at making 3s. Their 34.6 percent accuracy is slightly worse than the league average of 35 percent. But merely forcing opponents to respect the threat of the 3 has opened up driving lanes for Charlotte's guards.
According to SportVU tracking data on NBA.com/Stats, the Hornets shot just 41.3 percent as a team on drives from the perimeter last season, the league's fifth-worst mark. That has improved this season to 44.9 percent, putting Charlotte right around league average.
The addition of Lin, who leads the Hornets with 7.6 drives per game, has certainly helped -- Lin is shooting a solid 49.5 percent on drives. But starting point guard Kemba Walker has been even more accurate, making 50.4 percent of his shots on drives after shooting just 41.6 percent on them a year ago.
Overall, Charlotte is making 47.9 percent of its 2-point attempts, up from 45 percent in 2014-15. Factor in the improvement beyond the arc, and the Hornets' offense has improved dramatically.
Charlotte ranked 28th in offensive rating in 2014-15, ahead of only the lowly New York Knicks and Philadelphia 76ers. So far this season, the Hornets boast the NBA's seventh-best offense, and their improvement of 5.9 points per 100 possessions is the biggest of any team in the NBA.
Relative to league average, Charlotte's improvement on offense (from 5.2 percentage points worse than the typical team to 1.3 percentage points better) would be one of the 10 largest jumps since the ABA-NBA merger if the Hornets can maintain it for a full season.
By the Warriors' standards, an offensive rating 1.3 percentage points better than league average might not sound like much. However, it's worth noting that this year's Charlotte offense is far and away its best since the NBA returned to the Queen City via expansion in 2004-05. In fact, the current incarnation of the Hornets has never ranked better than 24th in offensive rating. (That came in 2013-14, when Charlotte last reached the postseason.)
Alas, because of the depth of this year's Eastern Conference, these Hornets are hardly guaranteed a playoff spot. At 17-16, they're currently 10th place in the East, one game back of eighth, despite outscoring opponents by 1.8 points per game. The Hornets' point differential is good for seventh in the East, just behind the 20-12 Chicago Bulls. That's impressive given Charlotte's playoff hopes appeared dashed when Kidd-Gilchrist was lost to injury.
The Hornets may not have managed to duplicate the Warriors, but by learning from them and other teams the value of outside shooting, they've managed to build a top-10 offense and stay in the playoff race. And that formula, unlike Golden State's, may be replicable elsewhere.