They have become the NBA's equivalent of the children in an ugly divorce. The Hornets didn't create this mess. They didn't poison what used to be one of the league's most loyal fan bases. Owner George Shinn and his sidekick, Ray Wooldridge, did that. The Hornets didn't overwhelmingly vote down a referendum for a new arena, which, in turn, sent tensions into overdrive. The disgruntled fans did that. And the Hornets certainly aren't the ones who microwaved the rhetoric of two cities, the paying public and the owners. The NBA took care of that.

The players are the ones who are powerless to choose sides or interject anything into the proceedings. Sure, they may not be totally without blame. Derrick Coleman and Anthony Mason used to be Hornets, after all. But it's not their fault that their home life has become a living hell. And judging by their season-long struggle to reach .500, it's certainly leaving emotional scars. Like any kids caught in the middle of a bitter custody battle, they're the ones who've been left to deal with the repercussions-- the finger-pointing, the whispers, the anger, the isolation -- on a daily basis.

How bad is it? Before home games, bored parking lot attendants with no cars to direct at the Charlotte Coliseum use their orange glow wands as light sabers and reenact Star Wars. Nearly 20,000 seats are empty for most games -- the Hornets average a league-low 11,400 tickets sold, but the actual gate count is less than half that -- leaving lonely beer vendors to read the newspaper to stay awake.

On the mezzanine hangs perhaps the most ironic banner in all of sports: "Go Hornets, GO!" Ah, but where? To New Orleans? To a new downtown arena? To new owners? And down on the court, Charlotte's electrifying All-Star guard, Baron Davis, warms up over the chirping of cell phones.

"Hello?"

"Hi!"

"Hornets game."

"No, no, free tickets."

"Bob's boss, I think."

The Hive is so deserted, so creepy and quiet, that attending a Hornets game has the voyeuristic feel of sneaking into a closed scrimmage. Against the Bulls on Feb. 13, the dinner theater-size crowd was treated to gastrointestinal play-by-play when Chicago's Tyson Chandler left the court, bent over clutching his gut and moaned, "Toilet, toilet, I need a toilet." Later, when Chicago was whistled for having six men on the court, then-Bull Ron Artest chucked a Gatorade bottle across the floor, and the sound of the rattling, skidding jug seemed to echo forever.

It was so deathly quiet on Jan. 3, when a little more than 1,000 people showed up for the Golden State game, that nervous refs T'd up the teams for foul language eight times. (Hornets officials want you to know that it was snowing that night, but almost 12,000 fans braved the same snowy weather the night before to watch Duke and Davidson.) Davis burst out laughing when, as he brought the ball up the floor at the beginning of the game, a fan yelled, "We got next!" When David Wesley's brother, sitting 25 rows up, decided to leave the game early, he just spoke in his normal voice and said, "Yo, David, I'm out. Don't wait for me after the game, cool?"

"People forget, we're the ones suffering through all this," says Davis. "All this stuff seems funny at first, until you realize that you have to play like this the whole year. You come out of the locker room to a crowd of 5,000, and it makes you feel like you don't even want to play."

Used to be, everybody wanted to be in the Hive.

For a decade, Charlotte worshiped three things with equal passion: Billy Graham, Ric Flair and the Hornets. The city was granted an expansion team in 1988, and led the league in attendance for seven straight seasons while selling out the 24,042-seat Hive 364 consecutive times. Fans were so thrilled to be in the big leagues, they gave the Hornets a standing ovation after their first game -- a 40-point loss to the Cavaliers. "When George Shinn secured an NBA franchise against all odds for Charlotte, he was like a god in this town," says Charlotte councilwoman Lynn Wheeler.

Shinn grew up poor in nearby Kannapolis and worked as a janitor to pay his way through Evans Business College, a school he would later buy as the cornerstone of his highly profitable chain of private business schools. He titled his Horatio Alger autobiography Good Morning, Lord!, and would sit courtside with Pat Robertson. Things began to sour in '96 when a string of bad decisions -- remember, it was Shinn who gave Larry Johnson a then-outrageous 12-year, $84 million deal four years before Johnson would become a free agent -- led to a steady parade of stars out of town and fans out of the arena.

But it was Shinn's 11-day gig on Court TV in 1997 for alleged sexual improprieties that turned this Bible Belt town against him. A local woman claimed that Shinn forced her to perform oral sex at his home and then offered her $200. Police did not find evidence to file criminal charges, and Shinn prevailed in the civil trial -- though during the proceedings he admitted to extramarital affairs, including one with a Hornets cheerleader. The plaintiff's husband shot himself to death as reports circulated that the suit had strained their marriage and finances. The whole sordid affair left Charlotte blushing for nearly two years, and the sellouts stopped. Suddenly, no one wanted to get caught by his pastor carrying Hornets tickets. "Shinn was so high and has fallen so far," says Wheeler. "It's really incredible."

Shinn was living in Florida full-time in '99 when he flirted with selling a piece of the team to North Carolina's favorite son, Michael Jordan -- a romance that ended when Shinn refused to give MJ the control he later received from Washington's Abe Pollin. Shinn then turned around and sold 35% of the team to Wooldridge, an Atlanta businessman with no background in sports. Claiming million-dollar-a-month losses, Shinn and Wooldridge (they call 'em Shinnridge in these parts) soon demanded that Charlotte build them a new quarter-billion-dollar arena. Or else. Charlotte, a booming banking town with cramped schools and crumbling infrastructure, held a tax referendum to finance a new arena in June 2001, and nearly 60% voted no. That's when the pair started flirting with the likes of New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Louisville, Oklahoma City and Norfolk, earning them the nickname Whorenets.

All of this has been an embarrassment to both the people of Charlotte and the league. When asked how he would deal with his own out-of-date arena, Sonics owner Howard Shultz said, "I'm never going to emulate the ownership in Charlotte. It's rude, it's arrogant and it's not fan-friendly." Former Sixers co-owner Pat Croce, asked recently by a Charlotte sports radio station how the league would fare if all owners ran their teams like Shinnridge, said, "They'd be bankrupt." Nonetheless, NBA owners appear ready to allow Shinnridge to move to New Orleans when they meet in early April, trading the nation's 27th-largest TV market for the 43rd -- which would be the smallest in the league.

Since January, Wooldridge has been in New Orleans, where the city has taken to the team like prohibition. With a week to go before a March 15 deadline, the Hornets were almost 50% under their self-imposed goal of selling 10,450 season tickets and 54 luxury suites in the Big Easy. Meanwhile, on Feb. 11, Charlotte leaders completed a plan to finance and build a new arena, with one middle-finger caveat: Dump Shinn and Wooldridge. "We will be in New Orleans next year," Wooldridge promises.

Commissioner David Stern and deputy commissioner Russ Granik have also added to the heated rhetoric by being highly critical of Charlotte and the city's leaders. "If you would not like to have the team, then don't have the team," Stern said at his All-Star press conference Feb. 10. "If you would like to keep the team, then do what you must to keep the team. But don't push it back to the NBA and hope secret things will happen." Granik has chastised the city for insisting that a new arena would be built only for new owners, while Stern has also been tough on Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory. "There's been a lot of talk down there in Charlotte, particularly from the mayor," he said. "There seems to be a lot of talk but virtually no action."

In yet another twist, Robert Johnson, the founder of the cable network BET, stepped forward March 6 as a potential buyer, further clouding the situation. Image-conscious city leaders are drooling over the prospect of dealing with Johnson, the nation's first black billionaire, instead of Shinn and Wooldridge. Johnson would also give the NBA its first black owner since Peter Bynoe sold his 25% of the Nuggets in 1992, and save them the embarrassment of leaving a rich basketball area. "We're caught in some pretty nasty crossfire," says Wesley. "One minute you hear Charlotte is doing this, and then it's New Orleans is doing this. You're leaving. You're staying. You have to stop following it, or it can really drive you crazy."

But how can they not follow it? Coach Paul Silas says the very thought of selling his dream home makes him wince. "Everyone is searching for a sense of stability," says Davis, who's renting month to month. Shinn and Wooldridge have largely kept the team and the front office in the dark about who might be coming with them, and when. "This is not the ideal situation for a basketball team to play under, that's obvious," says GM Bob Bass. "This is traumatic for everyone. We're all waiting to see what happens."

P.J. Brown has played power forward for the Hornets the past two seasons. Charlotte is his third team, fourth if you count the year he spent in Greece, and moving again is not high on his wish list. Almost every day, he and his wife, Dee, wonder if they'll have to sell their house, and where daughters Briana, 8, and Kalani, 5, will go to school in the fall. "Right now we're in a wait-and-see pattern," he says. "When they decide, that's when we'll start making our decisions."

Brown, a native of Louisiana, was at a Red Lobster recently when a gray-haired Hornets fan accosted him for wearing Mardi Gras beads, a symbol of the enemy. P.J., who has steadfastly refused to promote the team in his home state, just shrugged. "This doesn't really involve us," he told the man.

The interaction between fans and the Hornets is pretty much the same all over the city. Nothing personal, but we just can't stomach the owners any longer. "The fans still like the team," says Wheeler, "but their hatred of George is much stronger."

The heavy toll all this has taken on the court is undeniable. Expected to contend for the Eastern Conference title, the Hornets have never been more than two games over .500 this season. While injuries to Jamal Mashburn, George Lynch and Wesley are partly to blame, consider this: Until the Hornets lost to Seattle at the start of a recent four-game road trip, they were the only team in the league to have a winning record on the road and a losing record at home. "A few thousand more fans, and we would have had five more wins," says Brown. "No doubt."

The Hornets are actually about where they were last season, when they finished sixth in the East at 46-36. And they are finally healthy. Mashburn returned on Feb. 18 after missing 42 games with a strained abdominal muscle and is averaging 19.6 ppg, 6.3 rpg and 4.2 apg. Wesley came back March 1 after missing 13 games with a cracked bone in his left foot. And Lynch is finally back from a season-long battle with a fractured bone in his left foot, providing the kind of defense that helped the Sixers reach the NBA Finals last year. The emergence of 6'9" second-year forward Lee Nailon gives the Hornets another scoring option, and they have the East's biggest frontcourt with seven-foot Elden Campbell and the 6'11" Brown. "When Charlotte is completely healthy, they have all the pieces in place," says Indiana coach Isiah Thomas. "They're one of the four or five best teams in the league."

But the strain of their situation is showing. Trailing New Jersey by two points with just a few seconds left Feb. 14, Campbell backtapped the ball out to Davis, thinking the Hornets needed a three to tie the game. Oops. The buzzer sounded before Davis could get the shot off. "I can't lie," said Campbell. "The only reason I threw it back out was because I thought we needed a three." The bonehead play marked the end of a brutal week for Campbell, who had repeatedly clashed with Silas and was sent to the locker room for the final 16:16 of the opening half against the Lakers two nights earlier. After losing on a buzzer-beater by Kobe Bryant, Davis booted the game ball off the Coliseum scoreboard and threw his headband to the ground.

"We're just as talented as any single team in the Eastern Conference," says Davis. "And if we start to win, the fans will come back. They'll be too afraid they might miss out on something. And if they don't, who cares?"

For the time being, though, the Hornets are just trying to get through the season. Recently, as part of the team's Read to Achieve campaign, Jamaal Magloire and Nailon read to children at a YMCA on the northeast side of Charlotte. Sitting under a basket, surrounded by jumpy kids geeked up on juice boxes and trail mix, Nailon was having trouble getting his pupils to sit quietly. So he reached into his sweats, pulled out a wad of bills and promised to slap some scratch on anyone who paid attention. From then on, the children quieted down, sat up and hung on Nailon's every word.

Cash incentives? Finally, a Hornets marketing scheme that might actually work.

This article appears in the April 1 issue of ESPN The Magazine.