A little more than halfway through the season, the East’s playoff picture looks relatively secure. The gap between the 10th-seeded Atlanta Hawks and the 11th-seeded Milwaukee Bucks is not insurmountable (2.5 games), but the Bucks, Brooklyn Nets, Indiana Pacers, and Washington Wizards either have incentives to lose, are without their star player, or both. The one team that could realistically crash the party is the Charlotte Hornets.
Charlotte, one of the hottest teams in basketball, will get another chance to prove its mettle against a team in the playoff picture when it hosts the sixth-seeded Philadelphia 76ers for a 3 p.m. ET clash.
The Hornets will have a full staff available, with Collin Sexton (who’s probable with a hamstring injury), the only regular contributor listed on the injury report. The 76ers, meanwhile, will be without both Paul George and Joel Embiid as they manage their knee injuries on the front end of the back-to-back.
Charlotte is a 2.5-point favorite on DraftKings Sportsbook (-135 on the Moneyline), with the point total set to 228.5. Philadelphia is +114 on the Moneyline. Below, I’ll break down the possible Play-In Tournament preview and offer my prediction.
Philadelphia 76ers at Charlotte Hornets preview, prediction
The Hornets’ lengthy rebuild is finally beginning to bear fruit: they have the league’s best net rating in January. That still hasn’t led to a contender-level record — they’re just 7-6 in that span — but in the long run, net rating is one of the best predictors of overall success. Rookie of the Year candidate Kon Knueppel is the headliner — it’s a matter of when, not if, he breaks the rookie three-point record — but the fact that the oft-injured LaMelo Ball hasn’t missed a game since December 14 and has made 41.5% of his threes since his return helps. Charlotte has four players averaging at least 18 points per game, the only team in the league with such a well-balanced scoring attack.
The 76ers might only have two players above that 18-PPG threshold, but one of those players is Tyrese Maxey, who’s leading the league in minutes and ranks third with 29.9 points per game. Maxey’s superstar emergence both decreases Philadelphia’s reliance on the injury-prone Embiid in the short term and extends the 76ers’ contending ceiling in the long term, given that he’s just 25 and standout rookie VJ Edgecombe only 20. Maxey and Edgecombe are both capable of enough offensive burden to overcome Embiid’s and George’s absence tonight.
76ers at Hornets pick, best bet
The Hornets’ January form has been driven in large part by their dominant rebounding — this month, they’ve snagged 55.5% of all available rebounds, including 36.3% of all available offensive rebounds — which has directly led to a 5.3-point advantage on second-chance points. An edge in rebounding percentage should be relatively sustainable, since it’s not impacted by the number of rebound chances a team gets, and though Philadelphia’s rebounding percentage is technically 0.6 percentage points higher without Embiid on the floor and 1.3 percentage points higher without George, it never hurts to have a seven-foot, 280-pound body on the glass. I’d expect Charlotte’s advantage on the glass to last tonight.
The Hornets could have a lot of rebound chances against the 76ers, who get into the paint at the league’s third-highest rate but have been the worst finishing team. They should still be able to get to the rim even without Embiid — three of their four players who attempt layups at the highest frequency are active — but they won’t be more accurate, since of those four players, Embiid has the highest conversion rate.
For the season, Charlotte has allowed opponents to get downhill at a high rate but been an above-average rim protection team, but since the start of 2026, it’s been the opposite; the Hornets’ perimeter defense has been stingy, but opponents made their layups at the third-highest rate. It’s an unfortunate tradeoff of replacing a more traditional rim protector in Ryan Kalkbrenner with a more versatile defender in Moussa Diabaté, but it’s hard to argue with the overall results: among the 25 units that have taken the floor together for at least 50 total minutes, the Ball-Knueppel-Brandon Miller-Miles Bridges-Diabaté quintet has the league’s best offensive and net ratings.
If Philadelphia is able to finish inside at a better rate than usual and not get completely destroyed on the glass, it could have a chance based on its transition play, in which it is a top-10 unit in basketball on both ends. Embiid’s and George’s absences won’t change much, since neither is much of a factor on the fast break. Where their absences will matter is shooting: the 76ers already generate a below-average number of wide-open threes as is, and Embiid ranks second on the team in uncontested attempts per game while George leads the team in field goal percentage on such shots. Charlotte, meanwhile, has created the fifth-most wide-open looks and have allowed fewer attempts per game than Philadelphia has. Some of the Hornets’ recent development is shooting luck — opponents have canned just 33.0% of their uncontested threes so far in January — but the hustle is legitimate.
At some point, Charlotte will learn to play in clutch situations and translate its dominant net rating into wins. It managed to do so in closing out the Washington Wizards on Saturday, thanks to a short jumper by Ball and a series of offensive rebounds that ultimately resulted in a trip to the charity stripe for Knueppel. If the Hornets find themselves in such a situation tonight, Maxey might be the best clutch player on the floor, but they are simply the better team. Without George and Embiid, the 76ers might be a touch too reliant on Maxey and Edgecombe, who, for all of his talent, has been inconsistent in his rookie season.
