Celtics roll Hornets 119-80 and the -8.5 pick cashes easily

Boston didn't need a fourth quarter to make this one ugly. The Celtics beat the Hornets 119-80, a 39-point margin that buried the -8.5 spread with room to spare. Our published pick of Boston -8.5 hits, and the reasoning held up where it counted.

Going in, rest was a wash: both teams had two days off and four games in seven days, so the call came down to scoring profile. Boston's offensive efficiency of 113.7 against Charlotte's 99.7 was the biggest edge on the sheet, and the Celtics' last ten had them running +6 a night while the Hornets sat around -11 with an 0-5 skid. We shaded the projection for the three-point home-court adjustment and for small samples of 8 or 9 games, and still landed on a margin of about 9 to 10. That number was the reason to back Boston, and the final margin came in at roughly four times it.

Is this a tidy win for the model? Sure. But a 39-point rout raises a fair question: did the market underrate the gap in quality, or did Charlotte simply have no answer? Our notes don't include the box-level detail, so we'll leave the how to the people who watched it. What we can say is that the lean was right, and the Hornets' slide keeps getting uglier.