5 offseason needs for the Charlotte Hornets

3. Pick a competitive direction

Last year, the Hornets couldn’t as easily focus on getting younger, with crunches to salary cap space, roster spots, and draft capital. They also had very little in the way of young talent to build around, with only three players under the age of 24 and none of those three seeing real minutes. In order to be good eventually, they needed time more than anything else. Time for the bad contracts to expire, time for the young players to develop, and time for draft capital to build up. As a result, they really couldn’t decide whether to bottom out or sink more assets into winning now. That same decision played itself out again at the trade deadline, when the Hornets refused to hard commit into expensive players like Harrison Barnes or Marc Gasol, both of whom were highly connected to Charlotte, but only at asset prices that the Hornets wouldn’t find acceptable. The year was a lame duck year from a competitive standpoint, and it almost worked out well enough for them anyway.

Which means that now, a year later, with the Hornets almost out of the woods on bad contracts, and starting to develop a somewhat usable young core, the Hornets actually have the ability to either cash in on assets or bottom out. While the Hornets conclusively don’t have the draft capital to chase an Anthony Davis level star, should someone at the Otto Porter or Tobias Harris level become available, they have the assets and the expiring money to chase that second star to put next to a freshly re-signed Kemba Walker.

Or, with Walker a free agent, the Hornets can also decide to fully commit to the youth, lose a bunch of games, and come away with a high pick in a 2020 draft that looks extremely crowded with talent. Practically, if Walker is okay with losing a bunch of games along the way, they could even elect to focus on the youth while allowing Walker to lead them, since Walker, entering his age-30 season, likely won’t be good enough to stave off a bottom of the league finish on his own for long, and the losses of pieces like Jeremy Lamb and Frank Kaminsky next season could easily cause the team to drop the extra three games the Hornets would’ve needed to grab a top ten pick this year on their own.

What the Hornets cannot do, however, is continue to try to execute both paths, because that will leave them fairly inevitably stuck in the 11-20 range of the draft, with no path out. They must pick a competitive direction. It doesn’t matter which they choose, and it doesn’t really even matter how hard they elect to pursue it, but they can’t sit in this lame duck period forever at risk of burning off fans again.