Should the Charlotte Hornets be playing the youngsters more?

The Charlotte Hornets suffered another predictable loss Monday, as the Boston Celtics whipped them for the second time in three days.

Boston’s Jayson Tatum torched the Hornets for 51 points as the Celtics, currently sporting the No. 1 record in the Eastern Conference, won their seventh game in a row. Charlotte made a fourth-quarter run to cut the lead to two points, then showed why they are the Eastern Conference’s worst team with several mistakes and lost, 130-118.

The Hornets (11-34) ultimately didn’t have enough talent to beat Boston (33-12) before an announced sellout crowd of 19,227. That’s the case on many nights, as Charlotte slogs through a season whose salvation will depend on what sort of high draft pick it produces.

But here’s a question for you:

Should the Hornets be playing their youngsters more?

Even in a game in which Charlotte had three veteran rotation players unavailable due to injury or illness, young players like Kai Jones, James Bouknight and Nick Richards never saw the floor Monday.

Mark Williams, the Hornets’ first-round pick in 2022 out of Duke, did play 17 minutes as the backup center and played well. JT Thor played 11 minutes.

Bouknight and Jones were first-round picks for Charlotte in the 2021 NBA draft and are afterthoughts now. Richards was a second-round pick in 2020, Thor a second-round pick in 2021 and Bryce McGowens (who played 12 minutes Monday) a second-round pick in 2022.

Hornets coach Steve Clifford started Jalen McDaniels, PJ Washington and LaMelo Ball against Boston, all of whom are under 25.

At this point, it doesn’t matter if the Hornets win on a night-to-night basis. So should they give, say, some of Dennis Smith Jr.’s minutes to Bouknight? Or should they bench center Mason Plumlee — who’s actually playing quite well — and split those minutes between Richards, Williams and Jones?

I’d like to see the young guys play more myself, though I recognize that Bouknight in particular hasn’t done much to deserve more playing time.

But Clifford would — and did — argue that the young players already get plenty of chances to impress him and the coaching staff. When I asked the coach Monday afternoon about the balance of playing the youngsters vs. trying to win, he reeled off a four-minute, 700-word answer that revealed he had thought about the issue for a long time.

To publish Clifford’s entire answer would take up this entire column, but here are a couple of excerpts:

▪ “What the fans obviously don’t see is that they (the young players) have a chance every day. Like (Tuesday, at practice). They do play every day. They do play live, I do watch closely and we do filming.

▪ “I think there’s sometimes this misconception that when guys are not playing minutes, they don’t get a chance to be seen. Nothing could be further from the truth…. I’ve read articles where general managers will say you can’t develop players without minutes played. I would totally disagree with that. I would say that player development is about minutes earned.

▪ “So one thing that I do love about here is Mitch (Kupchak, the Hornets GM) is old school. And nobody is more old school than Michael (Jordan, the Hornets owner)…. You know, we don’t have one guy on our roster that can complain right now (about playing time). Not one, if you’re truthful…. They’ve all had a chance, OK? Some of them did a lot better than others, and those are the guys that are still getting a chance.”

That, in a nutshell, is Clifford’s theorem. The players who aren’t playing? They are practicing in live scrimmages and not doing enough there to earn the playing time.

All of which is likely true.

But at some point, an experimental youth movement might help, and wouldn’t hurt. The Hornets literally have nothing to lose this season. Losses don’t hurt anything except their pride. The more defeats they pile up, the more likely they are to get lucky in the lottery and win French phenom Victor Wembanyama, the 7-foot-3 power forward.

To digress a second: Since it comes up a lot with the Hornets, let’s review the current lottery rules.

As long as the Hornets finish in the bottom three NBA records (they are currently second-worst, behind woeful Houston) they will be one of the three teams with the best lottery odds. By NBA rule, the three worst teams all sport a 14% chance of getting the No. 1 pick, which is far different from the pre-2019 structure in which the worst team had a 25% chance of winning the lottery.

The lottery is months away, though. In the meantime, the Hornets need to sort out the bottom half of the roster and figure out which of these guys can really play and really want to work, and which don’t.

Because at some point, as hard as it is to believe, it’s actually going to get better for this franchise. And then it’s going to matter.