The Charlotte Hornets handed out a demoralizing 150-95 beatdown to the Utah Jazz Saturday night, which even if there weren’t NFL playoff games going on still probably wouldn’t garnered a ton of attention. Given both teams have losing records and likely will be headed back to the draft lottery again in the spring, there’s not going to be a ton of interest in a matchup between these two squads.
But the final score is enough to want to dig into things and ask, “Wow, what happened?” In short, the Hornets were just automatic on offense. They took 59 3s and and made 40% of them. They shot 52.5% from the floor over the entire game. It wasn’t a case of a single player going off for a massive stat line, no every member of the Hornets who played — which was literally every active player on the roster — put up points. Nine players scored in double figures for the Hornets, with only one player, Tre Mann, eclipsing the 20-point mark. Meanwhile, the Jazz couldn’t buy a bucket from beyond the arc, shooting an abysmal 22.6% from deep. And when you’re trading 2s for 3s on the other end, things can get out of hand quickly.
But the final score doesn’t really do it justice for how jaw-dropping this win was for the Hornets. To give it even more context, second-year forward Cody Williams, who played 33 minutes for the Jazz, finished the game with a plus-minus of -60. For those unaware, plus-minus tells us how a team does when that specific player is on the floor. So a positive number signals that the team is outscoring their opponent by that much when that player is on the court, a negative number means their team is getting outscored by that amount. Williams played the most of any other player for Utah, so with him on the floor the Jazz were basically getting outscored by 60 points.
With the final score being what it was, yep, that’s pretty accurate. Williams’ terrible feat makes it the worst single game plus-minus in NBA history, beating the previous record of -58, which was held by both Jeremiah Robinson-Earl and Scoot Henderson.
The NBA didn’t start tracking play-by-play data until the 1996-97 season, so it certainly leaves room for there to be an even worse mark prior to that. But Williams now holds the new record in the play-by-play era, a record no player wants to hold.
As bad as the Jazz played defensively, though, because there was no single player who took over on offense for the Hornets, there’s no record setting plus-minus number on Charlotte’s side. The highest plus-minus is from Moussa Diabate who had a +38 plus-minus. But that doesn’t come close to the single game all-time record. That feat goes to Luc Mbah a Moute during the 2017-18 season, when he recorded a +57 plus-minus after playing 26 minutes and putting up 13 points, four rebounds and four steals.
That may come as a surprise to many who might’ve expected someone like Nikola Jokic or another ultra efficient offensive engine to hold that record, but plus-minus goes far beyond just counting stats. It takes into account things that don’t show up on a boxscore, like well-timed screens that lead to a bucket, making the right reads defensively or making the extra pass to set up a teammate on offense. It shows which players make the most impact on both ends of the floor beyond just scoring, grabbing rebounds or dishing out assists.
Unfortunately for Williams, despite putting up 15 points in the loss, he wasn’t helping the Jazz in other areas that translated to winning. But no one on Utah’s team was, so while he will hold the record, every member of the Jazz should wear this badge of dishonor and let it motivate them to ensure a performance like this never happens again.
