the c's played hard in chicago, they definitely played hard in washington a few weeks back, and i thought they played hard in the second half against charlotte. i'm not sure that i buy this narrative that they're all dogging it (though i would agree that green's effort has been suspect).
the c's got into trouble against charlotte because they only put up 36 points in the first half. that's not just a function of bad effort, it's talent. our guards and wings are mostly awful outside shooters, even though they get a lot of good looks, we're shooting just .324 from 3 on the season, compared to the league average of .352. guys aren't intentionally missing because they don't want to hustle, they just aren't very good at hitting longer shots. if we shot at the league average for threes, we'd score about 2 more points more per game. it doesn't sound like much, but it adds up over a season.
add to that that few of our players are above-average defenders (most notably our bigs), and we have a real problem. most of those guys just don't have a lot of natural defensive talent. olynyk, sully, bass, turner, pressey, thornton, nelson... none of those guys have great athleticism, length, or lateral movement. when they're playing hard they can be average, but not much better, most of the truly gifted defenders in this league have better natural ability. we've been picking from the scrapheap late in the draft year after year, and so we have some flawed 1-way players who are useful NBA players but can't carry a team.
this is not to say that the c's have had great effort every game. they haven't. but no team brings it every quarter, every night in an 82-game season. this team just happens to not have the talent to win when they're not playing well.