Charlotte Hornets: Rich Cho Gets Extension?
The Charlotte Hornets have reportedly extended their current general manager for another season.
Despite the results of the past season, the Charlotte Hornets have not given up on the current plan of team building. They have extended the contract of one of their key front office players of one more year, General Manager Rich Cho, according to reports from Marc Stein of ESPN. Retaining Cho shows that the team still believes in the kind of work that Cho has been doing the past few years.
There is also a word of caution in this extension. It means that Cho needs to show real improvement in the team this coming season. If not, then that extension will not have meant too much in the end.
Cho’s great accomplishment was to field last year’s forty-eight win team that went to the playoffs. The problem with that squad was that it was built essentially on a bunch of players who were all in contract years. The benefits did not help the Hornets’ long-term goals so much as they made Courtney Lee, Jeremy Lin, Marvin Williams, and Nicolas Batum all rich.
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The Hornets did salvage the identity of the forty-eight win team by retaining Batum and Williams, but they again had to rebuild depth on the fly. With the elevation of Kemba Walker to All-Star status, that seemed to work for a while. However the Roy Hibbert experiment in the post did not turn out. The Hornets compounded that error by bringing in Miles Plumlee, who proved injured.
The Hornets leave the season having missed the playoffs. Their core of Williams-Batum-Walker-Michael Kidd-Gilchrist–Cody Zeller is intact. The question for Cho will be: is it enough? The Hornets would do well to look at their trading options as Marco Belinelli and Ramon Sessions are in the last year of their deals. The Hornets might also look at how to get Plumlee off the roster, but there are not likely to be partners interested in that. In years past, that might have been accomplished by packaging a draft pick with him. The Hornets need their draft picks too.
Don’t look for Cho to blow up the roster with only one year left on his contract. He will have to build on the peripheries of the current nucleus. He should consider a better option at reserve point guard and definitely see if Plumlee will be worth anything to the team from here on out. If not, then the Hornets could use competence at the fourth big man spot.