After exciting playoff push, what Hornets’ owners said about push to ‘get better’
Digging into the mental archives, Gabe Plotkin rattled off a flurry of moments that stuck out during the Charlotte Hornets’ latest campaign.
The Hornets’ final home game of the season, when Coby White etched his name into franchise lore with the game-tying bucket to send Charlotte’s eventual play-in tournament victory over the Miami Heat into overtime, rolled off the tongue of the Hornets’ co-owner first.
“The biggest individual memory was Coby’s shot,” Plotkin said Monday, “and then just that last play where Miles (Bridges) and Brandon (Miller) chased down that shot and everyone falling on each other. But it was the togetherness, the relentless pursuit in our front office of trying to improve the team.
“It was resilience that you saw throughout that game when we shot the ball very poorly and just the competitiveness. I think that game in many respects represented a lot of what we’re trying to build.”
Figuratively and literally.
Plotkin’s thoughts on the Hornets’ 2025-26 season came as he stood next to fellow Hornets co-owner Rick Schnall. The two were on a dais inside a tent merely a few feet from the base of the team’s multi-million dollar performance center.
A ceremony marked the installation and riveting of the final steel beam, signaling the project is hitting the next stage of construction. The $180 million state-of-the art facility is being erected across the street from Spectrum Center, linking the two buildings, and will serve as the main home for Hornets Sports & Entertainment’s full-time employees.
Top to bottom rebuild shows improvement
It’s just the latest investment into the team by Plotkin and Schnall, who’ve essentially turned the organization over from nearly top to bottom since taking control almost three years ago. Whether it’s Jeff Peterson serving as president of basketball operations, coach Charles Lee roaming the sidelines or team president Shelly Cayette-Weston heading up the business side of things, the Hornets have revamped their most important departments, and it’s led to winning results.
Though they lost to Orlando in the play-in tournament and didn’t end the NBA’s longest current postseason drought, the Hornets more than doubled their win total from 2024-25 and boasted the largest turnaround in net margin differential in NBA history. Still, ownership understands there’s plenty of room for growth over the coming months to sustain any kind of momentum.
“We have arrived at the point where we feel great about our leadership team, and we feel great about where we are, but we have a lot of work to do,” Schnall said. “You look at the playoffs, we would have had a tough time in the playoffs. We have to continue to build the team. We also have a lot of players on our team that reflect what we’re about.
“We have competitive players. We have high-character players. We have players who want to win. Gabe and I are incredibly competitive, as is our ownership group and as is our leadership team. We’re not going to be satisfied just being a competitive team. And so we will do everything we can to get better.”
Plotkin certainly concurs.
“Where we are is kind of where we ended (the season) in a sense,” Plotkin said. “We’ve gone from being kind of a forgotten team without a path and culture to a team with a really strong foundation, to a team that won 44 games but also didn’t actually make the playoffs. We’re one of the youngest teams in the league, we have a ton of picks and it’s our job to kind of figure out how we go from here to take it to that next level.
“The minute the season ends, you feel bad for a day or two and also really good in many respects, stepping back. But then it’s like, ‘How do we continue to get better?’ And that’s really what our focus is and that’s not going to stop.”
As fans return, owners seek even more success
By doing that, the Hornets can capitalize on that fervor percolating around uptown during the stretch run. Highlighted by a 14-game sellout streak, which represented the longest in Spectrum Center history, the Hornets averaged an attendance of 18,670. That pace was 8.74% higher than a season ago.
Charlotte also welcomed well over 760,000 patrons to games this past season after that number stood at 703,000 fans in 2024-25. That’s the most in the two-plus-decade-old building’s history and highest since 1997-98.
In comparison, the Hornets averaged 19,232 in attendance at each game in 1998-98 at the now-demolished Charlotte Coliseum.
“The excitement and acceptance from the city has been incredible,” Schnall said. “And so like we thought, if we started to show some progress we would have more excitement. But now we’ve become sort of the talk of the town and it’s so great to be in a city where everybody can rally around this. And we did say that we wanted to do this in conjunction with the city, that this was a shared mission between us and the community.
“It’s a community asset and we’re seeing it much more strongly than we even thought. I feel like we’re doing things which make our fans and our sponsors feel like they are part of our success. And when you can do that, we can celebrate success together. It’s so much more rewarding and fun. And so that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Which brings it all back to Plotkin’s mental Rolodex. He recalled peering into the stands during their thriller against Miami and nodding virtually in his head at the scene that showed the state of the Hornets.
“There was a moment before the game — I don’t usually do this — but I’m looking up and it’s 18,000-plus fans,” Plotkin said. “Two years ago, that might have been like 6,000 in some meaningless game at the end of April and we’re playing guys in the G League. It’s like, ‘Wow, this is really an awesome moment.’ And the fans, their support was incredible all year, and it just built throughout.”
Plotkin couldn’t stop thinking about the ground swell of backing by the lovers of purple and teal.
“To see their excitement and knowing that coming into our arena was going to be a real challenge for the other team because the fans are going to be like a true sixth man, that was awesome,” Plotkin said. “That is certainly far ahead of schedule and far exceeded any expectation that we would have had. We stated, ‘Ok, Carolina, they love basketball. They really love basketball here.’
“And it was so heartwarming to see that when you put not just a team that was winning, but having fun, joy, and the way the city and the Carolinas fell in love with that team, you know, you can build them. That’s something really tangible. So, I think collectively that all sort of encapsulated in that final game at home.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2026 at 5:02 PM with the headline "After exciting playoff push, what Hornets’ owners said about push to ‘get better’."
