The Charlotte Hornets are approaching an offseason with one big decision they have very little control over, and a bunch of little ones they have more ability to control. Here are the five things they need to achieve over the course of those decisions:
After a season that began promisingly, the Charlotte Hornets hit a midseason slump that pushed them too far down in the standings, leaving them just barely out of range of an almost successful playoff push while playing the youth. With the 2018-19 season in the books, the team is now at a crossroads, with Kemba Walker, widely viewed as the best player in franchise history, an unrestricted free agent. The team has very few other assets, wasn’t good enough for a playoff berth last year, and has very little capital with which to add other assets with only the 12th pick in the draft and little to no functional cap space.
What that means is that in writing a list of needs, either you have to accept that some of those needs may not successfully be met, or you need to move the goalposts to allow for marginal steps in the right direction to be sufficient. This list aims towards the latter, because the marginal steps are the far more interesting ones for the point in the Hornets’ talent cycle.