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Photo by Jonathan Bachman

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For all the accolades that the New Orleans Hornets have accumulated this season, they just can’t seem to knock the notion that they’re somehow underachieving this season.

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Maybe it’s that they set the bar so high last year. Maybe it’s because they’ve lost to teams like Charlotte (14–24) and Sacramento (9–29) or barely showed up in match-ups against NBA elites like the Lakers and Magic. Or maybe it’s just performances like tonight’s: an listless and almost humiliating 101–95 loss to the 14–22 New York Knicks.

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“It pisses me off more than anything,” Coach Byron Scott said of his team’s effort tonight.

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The Hornets, Scott said, are not a great team. “We’re a good team, when we want to be,” he said. The message, of course, is clear. Great teams beat every team they’re supposed to. Instead of having beat the Bobcats, Kings and Knicks, the Hornets failed to come ready to play and lost. Those three losses are the difference between being the second seed in the West and the fourth. But after the game, Tyson Chandler refused to compare tonight’s loss to those other embarrassments.

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“I’m not going to look back to losses we had earlier this season, but I will address this one and this is definitely a disappointing loss,” he said.

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That was the theme after the game: New Orleans knew that they should have won this game, yet they didn’t. All they have now is disappointment. Antonio Daniels said that, when you’re on a good team, these types of losses hurt more because they could have been prevented.

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“Here you come out every game and you expect to win every game,” he said. “Every loss is a disappointing loss because there’s not a team in this league that we can’t beat. And we know that.”

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Perhaps therein lies the reason this team doesn’t seem to be as good as it should be. Last year the Hornets proved that they have the talent and potential to be a top-tier team. This year, with everyone’s expectations — including their own — raised, New Orleans has developed a knack for failing to live up to them. Perhaps thinking that this team should be neck and neck with the Lakers for the Western Conference crown is unfair. But it’s certainly not unfair to think that this team could, and should, beat every sub-.500 team on its schedule.

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“We still ahve no learned from the past,” Scott said. “The Charlotte game there, the Sacramento game here and then New York tonight. Great teams in this league just don’t do that.”