Charlotte Hornets: The Lottery Awaits
The first opportunity to fix the Charlotte Hornets will come with the NBA Draft in July. However the Hornets are in the lottery which means they have to send a representative to the NBA office in Secaucus, NJ in May. There they get to see what a 1.7% chance of winning the first pick looks like.
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The Hornets only have a few draft spots that they could land in. They could somehow draw into the top picks. More likely they will be drafting at pick nine where their record puts them. There is a smaller chance that they will be at ten, eleven, or twelve.
Lottery position will be highly beneficial in any draft class, and this one is no exception. The top team will have their choice of freshman big men Karl-Anthony Towns or Jahlil Okafor. The second team is expected to take the other guy who is still on the board.
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This offers a minor dilemma for the Hornets if they win one of those top picks. Neither Towns nor Okafor is a good fit if sharing the court with Al Jefferson. If the Hornets wind up with the number 1 or number 2 pick, that will at least cause some interest in shopping the pick.
However it is dangerous to trade a can’t miss prospect. Drafting Towns or Okafor would then open up the other question: Do you trade Big Al? Okafor or Towns will not make the same money that Jefferson will next year, and maybe trading Jefferson would net other assets the team needs.
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Number one or number two is not likely. For the current model of Jefferson-centric play, the ninth pick is a safer place to be. Picks one through eight are full of big men and point guards. Wings start to appear at around the ninth pick. The Hornets are still looking for the guy to man the two spot, provide shooting, and play defense.
That is more likely to be Kelly Oubre or Stanley Johnson. Oubre is the better shooter while Johnson would be more like another Kidd-Gilchrist project.
If the Hornets go outside the box, I would hope they consider Wisconsin’s Frank Kaminsky. He is the one big whose game would complement Al’s. He would also enable the team to trade Marvin Williams if they need to.