Two years ago, the Charlotte Hornets looked like they’d be a problem for the rest of the NBA’s Eastern Conference. Ascendant with 48 wins, nearly the entire roster under the age of 30, and both a top-10 offense and defense, general manager Rich Cho and coach Steve Clifford had built a rising club poised to compete with teams like the Celtics, Raptors, Wizards, and maybe even the Cavaliers.
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Charlotte lost in the first round that year, dropping a Game 7 at home against the similarly good Miami Heat. But the future looked bright.
The Hornets finished No. 11 in the East the following year, and sit No. 11 in the East right now. Charlotte is four games out of the playoffs with a bottom-10 offense despite their all-star candidate Kemba Walker missing just two games.
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Meanwhile, all those teams the Hornets were supposed to be competing with are in fact hovering around the top of the East. Miami, the team that beat Charlotte in seven games in 2016, saw Dwyane Wade walk and Chris Bosh retire and still sits seven and a half games ahead of the Hornets.
Worse, the team is now making Walker available in trade talks as a means to push the reset button, according to ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski.
Charlotte has been encouraging teams to make offers and appear eager to discuss attaching Walker to a larger trade where another team takes on one of the Hornets’ several far less desirable contracts, sources said.
What went wrong in Queen City?
There’s no shooting
Among Charlotte regulars, only Marvin Williams (45.6 percent) and Treveon Graham (44 percent) are shooting above league average (36.3 percent) on three-pointers. Those two players are responsible for only 19 percent of Charlotte’s three-point attempts this season.
But it’s not just the threes where Charlotte struggles: the Hornets don’t come by high-percentage shots easily, either. The league as a whole is shooting 50.6 percent on two-pointers this season. Among all Hornets, only the resurgent Dwight Howard (53.8 percent) and Williams (52.1 percent after a recent hot streak) are better than that.
Kaminsky, still coming off of the bench, doesn’t hit threes frequently enough to make up for the fact that he plays away from the basket where the conversion rates are lower. Cody Zeller still hasn’t developed a long-range shot, which is a problem given that he shoots below 50 percent on twos. Per Basketball-Reference.com, Zeller is taking roughly two-thirds of his shots at the rim but converting just 52 percent of those. Given his lack of rebounding and playmaking prowess, it’s hard to see what exactly he brings to the table.
Nicolas Batum has had a dreadful shooting season, and as a result has lost confidence and is shooting fewer than 10 times per game. Jeremy Lamb, a sixth man who started while Batum dealt with injury, is a more consistent shooter, but still lags behind league average. Howard and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist start and play big minutes, but don’t take threes ever.
That leaves more shots for Walker. Among the 14 players shooting at least seven threes per game this season, only Tim Hardaway Jr. and Eric Gordon have a lower conversion rate than Walker. He’s a wonderful lead guard, but he’s not a good enough shooter to be forced to take this many deep balls.
All of that adds up to the No. 30 effective field goal percentage in the league. While Charlotte still doesn’t turn over the ball, draws plenty of fouls, and has improved on the offensive glass with Howard, you can’t have a decent offense shooting so poorly.
There’s no depth
There are two big knocks on Cho, the general manager since 2011. The first is his draft record is wildly inconsistent. The second is he has built a team that lacks depth.
These two problems are related.
Zeller is already 25 and has shown little of the skill needed to be a dependable NBA player. In a world of unicorns, he sticks out like a sore thumb: he can’t shoot threes, he can’t pass, he can’t get to the basket at will. He was Cho’s No. 4 pick in a bad 2013 NBA Draft.
Kaminsky, the 2015 lottery pick who will turn 25 before the end of the season, at least has some range and upside. But he hasn’t lived up to the hype at all. Michael Kidd-Gilchrist isn’t close to the all-star level Charlotte hoped for when he was taken No. 2 overall in 2012. The jury will be out on 2017 lottery pick Malik Monk for a couple years due to his youth. Cho hasn’t been able to make much magic deeper in the draft, and in fact made a really bad trade in 2016 (sending Charlotte’s No. 22 pick out for Marco Belinelli, who contributed nothing of value). Those draft whiffs mean the Hornets haven’t been able to stock the club with blue-chip rotation players.
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Cho has also been outmatched in free agency. Paying Batum top dollar meant losing Lin, a key reserve on that excellent 2015-16 squad. Lin has been injured pretty much ever since, so it’s hard to argue that finding a way to keep him would have helped Charlotte stay alive. But failing to backfill that role adequately certainly hurt. Cho’s one major success was Marvin Williams, who is Charlotte’s second-most reliable player. The rest of the roster is questionable.
Consider the Heat, who are now built around Goran Dragic (a costly acquisition for Miami that has paid off) and diamonds-in-the-rough like Hassan Whiteside, Tyler Johnson, Josh Richardson, and Dion Waiters, and smart if pricey free agent pick-ups James Johnson, and Kelly Olynyk. There’s no one on that list that the Hornets couldn’t have grabbed.
Walker is on par with Dragic. The difference between the teams is the rest of the roster. That’s on Cho.
Where do you find hope?
The toughest reality to digest with this Hornets team is there’s not a ton of hope on the horizon. The team’s worst contracts — Batum at more than $20 million per year and Zeller at $12-15 million — are the longest. No major contracts come off the books this summer, and Charlotte is capped out. Walker’s discount deal expires after 2018-19, and Williams, Howard, and Kidd-Gilchrist will be free agents.
A hard reboot at that point likely means scraping the bottom of the standings, something small markets like Charlotte are loathe to do for financial reasons, and will be even more loathe to do for competitive reasons amid lottery reform. Still, the latest news on Walker’s availability suggests they are considering that step.
As the losses pile up, that magical 2015-16 season looks more like lightning in a bottle than sustainable success. It fooled a lot of us, including the Hornets themselves. Now Charlotte will pay the price of believing.
