Charlotte Hornets: Road out of the dreaded middle not easy one

The Charlotte Hornets seem to be stuck where no franchise wants to be — far from title contention, but with an elite draft pick out of reach as well.

At some point in the very near future — barring some sort of historic collapse — the Charlotte Hornets will be eliminated from playoff contention for the second consecutive season.

At 34-41, the Hornets are 10th in the Eastern Conference, half a game behind the Detroit Pistons and 5.5 games in back of the Milwaukee Bucks, who currently hold the No. 8 spot.

Instead of the franchise’s fourth playoff berth since the 2004 reboot of the NBA in Buzz City, it looks much more like Charlotte will post a second straight losing season and wind up stuck in what I like to refer to as the “dread zone” — no real shot at a title or a premier draft pick.

Basketball-Reference.com has the Hornets with a 0.4 percent chance to make the playoffs, as close to impossible without the actual mathematics locked in as a team can get.

But Charlotte would also, based on current standings, hold the 11th spot in the draft order with just a 3 percent chance of snagging a top-three pick and only a 4.6 percent probability of landing in the top five.

More from Hoops Habit

If this all sounds annoyingly familiar to a Hornets fan, it’s because the franchise has never — in either iteration (the 1988-2002 original group or the Bobcats/Hornets since 2004) — gotten past being just good enough to live in the dread zone.

Charlotte 2.0 has never won more than 48 games, the Hornets’ total in 2015-16, and has never been seeded higher than sixth, also in 2015-16.

Considering that just one team in NBA history seeded sixth or lower has won the NBA title, the 1995 Houston Rockets, that’s a bleak outlook beyond just making the playoffs and perhaps winning a series.

It wasn’t much better the first time around, even if those classic Charlotte teams are fondly remembered as perhaps being better than they actually were.

The franchise record for wins is the 54 victories posted by the Hornets in 1996-97, good enough only to get Charlotte a No. 6 seed in the East and a first round sweep at the hands of the New York Knicks.

In 27 previous seasons, the franchise has never been seeded higher than fourth and has never advanced beyond the second round.

The problem is that under the current management, even when the team has been bad enough to attain a good draft position, a combination of bad bounces by the ping pong balls and less than stellar picks by general manager Rich Cho has left the Hornets unable to break through the barrier to that place where a team is better than just “good.”

The No. 2 overall pick in 2012 after the then-New Orleans Hornets jumped Charlotte in the draft lottery yielded Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, a player with a skill-set that might have made him a borderline star 25 years ago, but one who in today’s NBA is a bit of a misfit — a wing player with absolutely zero outside shooting ability.

In 2013, the then-Bobcats took Cody Zeller with the fourth overall pick. Zeller has been a bit injury-plagued in his five seasons in Charlotte (he’s been in and out of the lineup this season — mostly out — after surgery to repair a torn medial meniscus in his left knee, per the Charlotte Observer).

He’s also never been more than slightly better than a replacement player when he’s been healthy.

Outside of Kemba Walker‘s selection with the No. 9 pick in 2011, the Hornets’ draft record under Cho has been dismal — Frank Kaminsky at No. 9 in 2015 represents Cho’s second-best pick.

The misses have included Noah Vonleh at No. 9 in 2014, while the jury is still out on 2017 top pick Malik Monk, who currently plays just 12 minutes a game.

Looking ahead to June, the three most tantalizing prospects in Arizona center DeAndre Ayton, Real Madrid wing Luka Doncic from Slovenia and Duke big man Marvin Bagley will likely be off the board when the Hornets select.

Instead, it will be another shot at someone left in the low end of the lottery, which this year appears to be players such as Kentucky forward Kevin Knox, Michigan State forward Miles Bridges or Texas A&M center Robert Williams III. Alabama’s Collin Sexton is also in this group, but point guard is the one place Charlotte doesn’t need to look thanks to Walker.

Free agency hasn’t done Charlotte any favors on Cho’s watch, either. The biggest splash came in 2016 when the Hornets landed Nicolas Batum on a five-year, $120 million contract that felt like a big overpay even with gobs of cap space available at the time.

We won’t mention the Lance Stephenson Experience from 2014, when Charlotte landed the enigmatic wing on a three-year, $27 million deal. Stephenson was benched after putting up a horrific .376/.171/.627 slash line and shipped to the Los Angeles Clippers after the season.

OK, so we will mention it.

Next: 2017-18 Week 24 NBA Power Rankings

The Charlotte Hornets appear to be primed to enter another offseason where the top draft prospects will be out of reach, the top free agents will be headed elsewhere and where the hope of ever escaping the dread zone seems slim for the immediate future.

Home/Charlotte Hornets