Charles Lee Gives Brandon Miller Injury Update After Early Exit vs. Celtics

Charlotte Hornets coach Charles Lee expects to know more about Brandon Miller’s right groin by Monday, which is also when the Cleveland Cavaliers come to Spectrum Center for a 7 p.m. ET tip-off.

Miller left Friday’s 119-80 loss to the Boston Celtics in the second quarter and did not return.

“To be honest, I saw him start to limp a couple plays,” Lee said. “He was, he was good, and then he asked for [a sub].”

“I think that we’ll evaluate him over the weekend, and then we’ll have more information,” Lee continued. “I think on Monday.”

He finished with 8 points on 3-of-10 shooting and missed all three of his 3s. One of the makes was an alley-oop dunk with 4:24 left in the first quarter that cut Boston’s lead to 24-14.

Boston was up 70-39 at the half. The Celtics hit 17 of 31 from 3-point range before the break, while Charlotte shot 28% and gave the ball away eight times.

“I just thought that we weren’t as sharp as we should have been,” Lee explained. “That might be on us, but just some plays I thought that characterized how that beginning of the game went. We turn it over, or we miss a shot. Ball’s out of bounds, and they are racing it down the other way and trying to get to an offensive possession. It ends up in a three, and I just thought a bunch of little competitive effort things that we’re usually pretty tight with, offensive rebound, or they were offensive rebounding, and so I thought our defensive rebounding allowed them to gain a little bit of momentum.”

“So I just thought in the early going, we laid out a couple screens, just things that aren’t characteristic of how we typically play,” Lee added. “And I thought that as the game went on, we got a little bit better, but they had already found a rhythm at that point.”

Jayson Tatum played into the final minute of the third quarter, by which point Boston led by 42, and finished with 34 points, 8 rebounds, and 9 assists. Derrick White added 18 for Boston, and Naz Reid scored 14 for Charlotte. The Hornets have lost six straight and are 3-7 overall, 0-2 in NBA Cup group play.

Miller missed his first eight shots Wednesday at Barclays Center and finished 2-of-15 in a 114-104 loss to the Brooklyn Nets.

“That’s part of the game,” Lee said. “That’s part of who Brandon is as well. So not surprised that he wasn’t going to let his offensive struggles dictate how he was going to respond and act and his actions and competitiveness defensively.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” Lee detailed. “That’s how the whole group is. Now we’ve just got to find a way to kind of just keep going, keep building, because there’s a ton of really good moments in there.”

He came into Friday at 22.0 points a game. His 39 against the Washington Wizards on Oct. 26 is the most he has scored in an NBA game.

In 2024-25, right wrist surgery held Miller to 27 games. A left shoulder subluxation against the Philadelphia 76ers on Oct. 25, 2025, cost him 13 more, and he wore a wrap on that shoulder for the rest of the season before surgery for instability in it on May 6.

Charlotte gave him a five-year, $209 million rookie-scale extension on Oct. 19, the biggest contract in team history. LaMelo Ball’s five-year, $203 million deal had been the largest.

Kon Knueppel and Moussa Diabaté, both starters, sat Friday. So did Grant Williams.

Knueppel’s season so far is 5:51, all of it Wednesday in Brooklyn, after he missed the first eight games with a left hamstring strain.

“I don’t have an update yet,” Lee said after that game. “We’ll evaluate it more when we get home from the road trip tonight.”

Two days later, Lee still had no timetable for him. Diabaté was questionable on Thursday’s injury report (right quad). Williams is out with a right hamstring injury; the team disclosed his and Knueppel’s hamstring injuries together on Sept. 25, both from offseason on-court work.

Counting Miller, Charlotte ended Friday without three of its starters.

“Like we said, coming into the year, it was going to be by committee, and we had to commit to everything that was going to go on and embrace every day of our journey,” Lee said. “And this is part of it. And right now, you’re in a little bit of a storm, and we got to band together even more.”

“We got to continue to work at an even higher rate,” Lee noted. “But in these moments, you grow even stronger. You learn about yourself, the resilience of this group, and how hard they want to work. I know that we’ll be able to kind of get through this thing, but we definitely got to make sure that we are staying together and focused on just the daily approach.”

After Cleveland, Charlotte goes on the road for four: Phoenix on Nov. 12, the Clippers on Nov. 15, the Lakers on Nov. 17, and Atlanta on Nov. 20.